Wikipedia down, shows ‘Too many requests’ error: How to fix as thousands of users complain of outage - latest update

Wikipedia appeared to be down for thousands of customers on September 11. Users flocked to social media to express outrage. At the time of writing, Downdetector, which tracks live site outages across the internet, noted over 1,000 people were facing problems.

A Wikipedia page is seen on a laptop screen. (Unsplash)Downdetector screenshot showing problems with Wikipedia. (Downdetector)As per Downdetector, most people faced issues with the website. The map showed that places like Chicago, Washington, Boston, New York, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles were among the worst hit.

The site also noted that users had been facing problems since 10:24pm ET. As per Wikipedia's official description, it is ‘a free encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of nearly 260,000 volunteers.’

“It is the largest and most-read reference work in history, and is consistently ranked among the ten most visited websites. Wikipedia is available in more than 300 languages, which together comprise over 63 million articles and attract more than 15 billion views every month,” the description further reads.

However, Wikipedia is yet to comment on the current reported outage and no cause for it is known either. It remains unknown when the issue will get resolved.

Meanwhile, people complained given that many use Wikipedia for day to day information.

One person explained the issue in the Downdetector comment section saying “The front page seems to be working because I can click on links from the front page, but whenever I type queries into the search bar, it gives me ‘Error Too many requests’.” They added that they were facing the issue on Safari browser but not on Firefox.

Several people took to X as well. “Wikipedia may be down right now — something's off. Anything broken on your end?,” one mentioned. Another wrote “Never ever seen Wikipedia down before im crying”.

Yet another said “In all my years alive, I have never seen Wikipedia go down.” One person also remarked that it was interesting for Wikipedia to go down since they are 'self-hosted', that is , they do not rely on any other servers for functioning.

Usually a 429 or Too Many Requests error means that Wikipedia's servers have gotten too many requests from a single device or IP address in a short time.

One can try and fix this by waiting for a few minutes since the server usually lifts the temporary rate limit after a small cooling period, clearing browser data, including cache and cookies for Wikipedia to clear corrupted session data, disabling browser extensions, switching the network or using a VPN, and checking automated scripts or APIs.

However, this error is also seen when there is an outage on the site's side and given the number of people facing this issue, user-end fixes are unlikely to solve the problem.

Shuvrajit has over seven years of experience covering US, India, and world news. An English Literature postgraduate from Jadavpur University, Shuvrajit started off covering entertainment, gaming and all things pop culture. There were brief periods away from the media industry, with short stints in content marketing, ed-tech and academic editing. However, the newsroom beckoned and over the last few jobs, Shuvrajit has exceedingly focused on team functioning as well, including tracking news and assigning tasks, working on everyday breaking news, framing detailed coverage plans, and creating immersive and data-driven stories. In his time as a digital journalist, he has covered a Lok Sabha election, multiple state elections, Union Budgets and award ceremonies. He has also helped in planning content for company event panels in the past. For work, Shuvrajit enjoys dabbling with data visualization, editing tools, and AI chatbots and attempts to incorporate AI workflows in everyday tasks. He is deeply interested in geopolitics, sports, films and music. Prompting is a new fascination for Shuvrajit now. Apart from that, he can be found doom-scrolling, sharing memes, or cheering on his favorite football team.Read More