Over the past few days, editors of the English Wikipedia have been experiencing intermittent edit failures, including "connection refused", and "502" errors, which sometimes mean the edit went through, and sometimes don't. For instance, a few minutes ago, I got:
500 Can't connect to en.wikipedia.org:80 (connect: Connection refused)
(My bot was attempting to edit [[Deep_Submergence_Vehicle]].)
And a few minutes later:
502 Bad Gateway
Sorry- we have a problem...
The wikimedia web server didn't return any response to your request
To get information on what's going on you can visit <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/wikipedia">#wikipedia</a>.<br /> An "offsite" status page is hosted on <a href='http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=Wikipedia_Status' class='external' title="http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=Wikipedia Status"> OpenFacts</a>.
Generated Tue, 23 Aug 2005 01:06:08 GMT by srv5.wikimedia.org (squid/2.5.STABLE9.wp20050410.S9plus[icpfix,nortt,htcpclr])
(My bot was attempting to edit [[Delta_Tau_Delta]].)
Similar symptoms have been reported by others on IRC and OpenFacts for the past few days. Given how long these problems have gone on, we seem to have either a shortage of hardware, or a shortage of developers to investigate these problems. The current situation is certainly making it quite annoying for *me* to edit, and I'm sure there are others who are being discouraged from making contributions entirely.