On Monday, the accidental cutting of two cables - near a data centre in Florida - hit the services of the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia as well as a number of its associated sites for nearly two hours, during which the services were either inaccessible or awfully sluggish.

Acknowledging the fact that the Wikipedia services had gone down due to cut cables, a Wikimedia blog post said that it was at around 9:15 a. m. EDT that the service outage was first reported.

The blog further added that all the sites - barring the mobile version of the online encyclopaedia - had been restored around 10:18 a. m. EDT. The services on the mobile site returned around 11:35 a. m. EDT.

About the sites which witnessed service disruptions on Monday, Wikipedia revealed on its performance and availability status page that performance issues were reported in its application programming interface (API), https services, payments, mail, Ubuntu mirror, the Wiki platform, the Wikimedia blog, the Wikimedia Foundation's main page, and several other sites.

The outage was a result of two broken cables - stretching between Tampa and Virginia - which were cut for nearly one hour and six minutes. Ruling out the suggestion that the cables had been cut with some malicious intent, Wikipedia said that after the repair work on the cables was completed, the basic service on its site was restored in about an hour's time.