Wikipedia goes offline in several countries after ‘malicious’ attack

Popular online reference website Wikipedia went down in several countries after the website was targeted by what it described as a “malicious attack”.

The server of the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts the site, suffered a “massive” Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, the organisation’s German account said in a tweet late Friday.

In a separate statement the Wikimedia Foundation said that the attack on the encyclopedia — one of the world’s most popular websites — was “ongoing” and teams were working to restore access.

DDoS attacks often involve legions of zombie computers — machines infected with viruses and commanded to simultaneously visit a website.