LONDON: Wikipedia went offline after a cyber attack forced an international shutdown. The outage affected millions of users across Europe and in parts of the Middle East.

A spokesperson from Wikimedia Foundation blamed the “malicious attack” on “bad actors” in a blog post-Saturday.

Wikimedia’s German Twitter account confirmed that a wide-ranging distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack drove the online encyclopedia offline.

Just as a refresher for any less-techie folks out there, a DDOS attack is when hackers overwhelm a server or network with more traffic than it can handle in the hopes of shutting it down.

(Agencies)