Reference status
Reference sites that much of the web quietly links to. All 1 are checked every 20 minutes; the status beside each one is the result of its most recent check.
Reference sites are the quietest entries here and the most widely depended on: Their outages break other products that silently call them in the background.
How reliable reference has been, last 30 days
Measured by our own checks, run every 20 minutes, not taken from any provider’s status page. 1 of 1 service has enough history to report.
| Service | Now | Uptime 30d | Downtime | Response |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | Up | 100.0% | none | 197 ms |
Wikipedia has been the steadiest here over the last 30 days. Uptime is observed uptime: The share of measured time our checks got a usable answer. It excludes nothing, including announced maintenance.
Why reference services go down
These are the services the rest of the web quietly builds on - encyclopaedias, code references, data sources, identifier registries. They are read-dominated, heavily cached and consequently among the most reliable services measured on this site. When they do fail, the cause is usually infrastructural rather than application-level, because the application itself is simple by design.
Their outages are noticed indirectly. A search feature stops returning results, an app shows a blank information panel, a documentation link breaks. The product looks broken and the actual failure is in a dependency the user has never heard of and the product never names.
What an outage here looks like
Pages load from cache while anything dynamic - search, editing, the API - fails. Because so much of these sites is cacheable, partial availability is the normal presentation.
When these services are under most strain
No strong daily pattern. Load correlates with the news cycle and with academic terms rather than time of day, and these services are rarely capacity-bound.
At a glance
- Typical duration
- Under an hour in most cases
- Usual cause
- Infrastructure or a data-centre event, rarely the application
- Tell-tale sign
- Articles load, search does not
- Reliability
- The highest average uptime of any category here
What to do when reference is down
- Try a search-engine cached copy. Reference content changes slowly, so a cached version is usually just as good for what you needed.
- Check whether only search is broken. Direct article links frequently work when the search box does not.
- Expect it back quickly. These are among the most reliable services in the directory, and their incidents are typically short.
Still not sure whether it is them or you? Check the site from our servers - We are on a different network, a different resolver and a different route from you.