Wikipedia--is it down or is it me?

[tdvance]

way off topic--can anybody try to get to Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org --or any language for that matter)--is it down or is it a "local" problem? It's been away for much of today, and I've never seen it have trouble for so long. Makes me wonder if it's a local problem or even if my DNS is spoofed or something (it tells me the IP address of Wikipedia is 208.80.152.2). I can't even ping it.

I wanted to look up "tdr" (I'm getting the old Windows Vista Timeout Detection Recovery" errors (which I used to get all the time, but not for the last several months since I upgraded to Vista SP1) ever since my last Windows Update and I wanted to see if Wikipedia had info that could lead to a solution).

[tdvance]

Would you believe--after deciding to post the question, I found my own answer--

www.samspade.org says the IP address is correct.

www.the-cloak.com (an anonymous browser) can bring up the Wikipedia page just fine, so it IS something local. Assuming it's not cached there or something (the last edit of the main page is 5:20am today, though I'm not sure the time zone, so it could be a "recent cache" but more likely is live).

[01101001]

way off topic--can anybody try to get to Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org --or any language for that matter)--is it down or is it a "local" problem?

I had trouble reaching the Wikipedia empire this morning, maybe 10 hours ago, some kind of routing problem, for maybe an hour or two max, but it might have continued without my trying it.

From a US west coast ISP I couldn't get there. I did traceroutes, but didn't pay much attention to where the wheels fell off. Very much a guess, just from what I see now and how much I saw then: somewhere in level42.net.

From an east coast ISP, it was wiki-quickie.

All's well right now. Name resolves to 208.80.152.2. Pingable, traceable.

[Celestial Mechanic]

I'm having trouble with Slashdot. (slashdot.org, the www. is not needed.) My browser just goes bye-bye when it starts loading images from images.slashdot.org. Did they make some drastic changes to their format?

[tdvance]

Wikipedia is back up for me (at least on work computer--have to go home and try there to be sure it's not something funny in my machine).

I did read that Amazon S3 (a data storage service) was down for much of yesterday, and apparently a fair number of websites use that for their data storage. That, however, would not explain Wikipedia failing for me, but working with the anonymous browser. Unless routing problems contributed to both.