The Signpost

Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Widespread issues on Christmas Day

Considerable editing issues presented themselves to users around the world for more than an hour on December 25 (wikitech-l). Between 18:50 and 20:20 UTC, edits were lost on a number of Wikimedia sites, although the problem was resolved cleanly on most, including the English Wikipedia. Only the Hebrew Wikipedia suffered lasting problems beyond the 90-minutes within which most problems were resolved on almost all sites. The glitch highlights the challenges of maintaining the stability of a website with as many visitors as Wikimedia sites over holiday periods when volunteers are few on the ground.

Another, unrelated issue, also came to light on Christmas Day. Bug #26429 ("Fatal error: PPFrame_DOM::expand") blocked a number of actions on the English Wikipedia, and quickly generated reports from a number of WMF wikis. Fortunately, the error only temporarily blocked editing and was worked around by reloading the page; it was reported as fixed on the afternoon of 26 December (UTC).

In brief

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.


















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-12-27/Technology_report