Wikipedia went down for many users around the world today, according to Downdetector — but the issues now seem to be resolved.
The problems started at around 10.51am ET / 3.51pm BST, when a large spike in reports appeared on the outage-tracking website — the reports peaked at just over 2,000 in the US and 850 in the UK.
It appears that some 'emergency maintenance' from Wikimedia was the culprit and appears to have now finished — but you can follow what happened in our liveblog below...
Wikipedia is working okay for me here in the UK, but it isn't for thousands of users right now — the reports graph on Downdetector is now over 3,000 in the US, and it's climbing in the UK too.
The cause is so far unclear, as there are no current issues at the major cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud or Cloudflare. I'll be digging into this and reporting back shortly...
THAT’S A FIRST, I HAVE NEVER SEEN WIKIPEDIA GO DOWN LIKE THIS?everything but the index page fails to load… huhhh??? https://t.co/5DtJ51QIkiOctober 21, 2026
This is what Wikipedia and Wikimedia currently look like for many users — an "error" page with a "please try again later" message. I've also never seen it go down like that, although it's working fine for me in the UK.
Strangely, there are a few other outages running concurrently right now, including Asana and the Internet Archive. It isn't yet clear if they're related, but they did start at very similar times (around 10am ET / 3pm BST). Wikipedia is certainly the worst-hit, though.
This probably explains today's Wikipedia issues — the Wikimedia Foundation status page says 'emergency maintenance' is in progress.
The foundation hasn't explained how long the maintenance will last or what it's for, but that should hopefully mean it's pretty short-lived...
Good news, it looks like the Wikipedia outage was indeed short-lived — or at least only lasted an hour.
The Downdetector reports have plummeted back down to zero, which suggests that 'emergency maintenance' is now finished.
Fortunately, that was all a lot more straightforward than the major PHP flaw that's turned government websites dark and sent website admins scambling...
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A linguagem de programação PHP é amplamente utilizada na Internet e está por trás de uma variedade de websites e serviços. Agora, a descoberta de duas vulnerabilidades críticas está agora a levantar sérias preocupações de segurança, podendo colocar sites e aplicações online em risco. As correções já estão disponíveis.
The post PHP: Vulnerabilidades críticas colocam sites e servidores em risco. O que está em causa e quem pode ser afetado? appeared first on Tek Notícias.
If you pay for an item using the contactless tech on any of the best iPhones, you’re locked into Apple’s way of doing things. But the UK government’s competition regulator — the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) — is proposing new rules that could blast open the way you pay using your iPhone.
According to a press release on the UK government website, the CMA believes that “Apple’s fees and rules are blocking UK fintechs and other businesses from innovating and growing” and that its proposed changes are “expected to result in substantially lower access fees, helping make it commercially viable for more businesses to innovate and compete.”
The CMA pointed out that no rivals to Apple Pay exist in the UK, as opposed to in the EU, where several alternatives can be used. The CMA believes this is due to both high fees charged by Apple and restrictions placed on certain technology by the Cupertino giant.
For instance, while Apple allowed third-party companies to offer Apple Pay alternatives in the UK back in 2024, one condition was that these firms had to use Apple’s Secure Element, which encrypts important payment card information during transactions.
In the EU, however, European Union-wide rules mean that Apple must let companies use host card emulation (HCE) for free instead of the Secure Element, if they wish. The CMA wants that kind of technology to be available in the UK and says it does not believe that doing so would raise any “inherent security concerns.”
Commenting on the CMA’s move, Mattias Eld, CEO & Co-founder at contactless firm Fidesmo, said: “Buying an iPhone should not mean handing Apple the keys to your wallet. Consumers should rightly choose how they pay, and banks should choose who they work with. But for over a decade Apple has honed its domination over tap-to-pay, through the careful and deliberate stifling of its competitors. This has allowed Apple to charge banks inflated transaction fees, with the threat of exclusion from such a vast market leaving them little choice but to pay.”
The CMA says that while it isn’t seeking to dictate the prices or terms that Apple must set, it wants to propose “principles for how this should be determined, with the expectation that charges would be substantially lower than Apple’s current fees while still fairly rewarding Apple for providing access.”
However, Apple has pushed back against the CMA’s proposals, telling Reuters that “We do not believe the CMA should require Apple to adopt an approach with lower privacy and security protections. We will continue to engage constructively to reach an outcome that is in the best interest of our users.”
Why does Apple restrict access to contactless payment tech? One answer might simply lie in the almighty dollar: as with the App Store, Apple charges third-party firms for access and likely doesn’t want to give up that revenue stream.
I’m not entirely convinced that that’s the main reason, however — after all, Apple is one of the wealthiest companies on the planet and makes huge profit margins on every product it sells. Is nickel and diming really such a core strategy when its iPhone revenue alone jumped 21% to $54.25 billion in the third quarter of 2026?
To me, a stronger argument centers on something else: control. This has been an obsession for the company since the days of Steve Jobs, and Apple is acutely, painfully sensitive to how its products are perceived.
If Apple loosened its grip on something so vital to the user experience as payments and financial services and a third-party contactless provider then got hacked or scammed customers, Apple fears that that will reflect badly on itself as a company. For the perfectionists at Apple, anything that lessens the user experience due to Apple’s actions is an absolute no-go. By taking payments entirely under its own aegis, Apple reassures itself that nothing will go wrong.
There’s a degree of logic to that. Apple has proven its security credentials and works harder than many companies to keep its systems incredibly safe. Going with a third-party means trusting someone else whose track record might not be as strong. But that certainly doesn’t mean that only Apple can safeguard your payment information — or indeed that only Apple should be allowed to even try.
If the CMA gets its way, Apple might be forced to change its ways. The company has already been forced to crack open its contactless walled garden in the EU, and the UK might soon follow. The way you pay using your phone might look very different as a result.
Os mais recentes números da SpaceX mostram uma transformação no peso dos diferentes negócios da empresa de Elon Musk, com a IA a assumir um papel central no crescimento financeiro.
The post SpaceX aumenta receitas em mais de 100% com inteligência artificial a ganhar peso appeared first on Tek Notícias.
A forma como descobrimos marcas e produtos está a mudar com o recurso às ferramentas de IA. Em vez de listas de resultados, agora é possível pedir recomendações diretamente a assistentes digitais, o que cria novas oportunidades (e desafios) para a publicidade online.
The post Inteligência artificial está a mudar regras da publicidade digital appeared first on Tek Notícias.
Volunteers and new recruits come together for ‘wikithon’ to put more detail about industry into public domain
“Anyone can edit Wikipedia,” the adage goes. But, it turns out, a relatively small number actually do.
What is worthy of a digital page in the world’s largest and most-read encyclopedia is decided by roughly 270,000 active volunteers, enthusiasts who populate the online resource with information on anything from 19th-century medicine to TikTok trends. Inevitably, some subjects are sidelined – the global south, notable women – but a new batch of Wikipedian recruits are waging war on one neglected topic: the arms industry.
Last week, in a classroom in central London, two dozen volunteers huddled around laptops and free servings of vegan Ethiopian food for what is known as a “wikithon”, an event of collective and in-person Wikipedia editing. Some were veteran editors in their 70s, others young students who had never registered an account before. But their targets include subjects such as Palantir, Project Maven and Nitro-Chem.
© Photograph: Lily Renshaw/The Guardian
© Photograph: Lily Renshaw/The Guardian
© Photograph: Lily Renshaw/The Guardian
Os cibercriminosos estão a explorar a confiança nas marcas tecnológicas mais conhecidas, com a Microsoft a concentrar já um em cada três ataques de phishing que imitam empresas. Apple, Google, LinkedIn e Amazon também estão no top das mais visadas.
The post Esquemas de phishing imitam Microsoft, Apple e Google para roubar dados e atacar computadores appeared first on Tek Notícias.
Os serviços da Google Cloud estão a recuperar depois de uma falha que afetou várias empresas e plataformas digitais na Europa. A Google afirma que o problema está resolvido para a maioria dos clientes, mas admite que um número reduzido continua afetado.
The post O que se passou com a Google Cloud? Falha deixa a Revolut e vários serviços com problemas na Europa appeared first on Tek Notícias.
As SpaceX impacts Ukraine and AI-generated music divides artists and fans, critics are asking what happens when technology has too much control over our lives
This was originally published in TechScape, a newsletter about how technology shapes our lives. Sign up to receive it here
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian, writing to you while sitting in front of Roy Lichtenstein’s monumental Drowning Girl, on view in New York City. Today in tech, we’re discussing the perils of Elon Musk’s one-man global infrastructure, AI-generated music and a Guardian AI conference in Paris.
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© Photograph: Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters
© Photograph: Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters
© Photograph: Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters
Nearly 100 years after the dirigible Graf Zeppelin made the first nonstop airship journey across the Pacific Ocean, another airship has successfully completed a round-trip flight from New Mexico to Japan and back. But the significance of this modern feat was less about the journey's length and more about its purpose: demonstrating how a lighter-than-air platform can act as a cell phone tower in the sky.
The trans-Pacific flight that took place over a month between August and September 2026 was the most notable milestone yet for Sceye, a US aerospace company based near Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sceye has developed an uncrewed platform filled with helium for buoyancy and equipped with an electric-powered propeller for active propulsion, allowing it to resist most strong winds and keep hovering over the same location for long periods. The platform also uses top-mounted solar panels and onboard batteries to stay powered for stratospheric operations around the clock.
“We can stay over an area of operation, and we do that in the stratosphere right around 60,000 feet, so we're twice as high as air traffic and we're above the jet stream, and yet 30 times closer than low-Earth orbit satellites,” Mikkel Frandsen, founder and CEO of Sceye, told Ars. “We can fly through day and night until the sun comes up the next morning and recharges the batteries, at which point we're still at the same altitude and still over the same area of operation.”
© Sceye
Wikipedia’s 68m articles have been consulted trillions of times. Not bad for a website that has barely changed since it was founded 20 years ago
A few years ago, I was struck by the tension between how Wikipedia was used, and how it was talked about. Everyone was on it all the time, and yet its reputation had stalled at “don’t trust it”, because it was the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”.
Clearly people were trusting it, so much so it had become part of the fabric of everyday life since it was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. But despite the fact it now has been consulted trillions of times by billions of people (English Wikipedia alone is 5.2bn words long), it inspires an odd lack of curiosity. Even people donating to Wikipedia might say the money was “for the factcheckers”, though there aren’t any – not paid ones, anyway. Meanwhile, the internet in the social media era had begun to feel like a much uglier place, and some digital nostalgia was setting in: here was this holdover that had somehow survived; a website that functions – and even looks – much the same as it did 20 years ago.
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© Photograph: Boris Roessler/EPA
© Photograph: Boris Roessler/EPA
© Photograph: Boris Roessler/EPA
A Apple bloqueou recentemente oito certificados vulneráveis que eram utilizados pelo Safari para determinar se uma página da web era legítima ou não — recurso que existe para proteger usuários de cópias baratas de sites feitas para golpes.
De acordo com informações do BleepingComputer, essas chaves privadas foram revogadas pela autoridade certificadora indiana eMudhra após pesquisadores descobrirem que eram tão fracas que qualquer pessoa poderia utilizá-las para forjar um certificado de uma página legítima.
Além do Safari, navegadores populares como o Mozilla Firefox e o Google Chrome também se baseavam nesses certificados para proteger usuários. Em um relatório, inclusive, a Mozilla explicou que todos os oito certificados utilizavam chaves privadas P-384 (geradas em abril de 2025), as quais tinham valores menores que 256 — o que permitia a qualquer pessoa recuperá-las testando apenas 256 possibilidades.
Descoberta primeiro por um pesquisador identificado apenas como Wayne, em 17 de outubro, a vulnerabilidade foi demonstrada no GitHub por outro pesquisador chamado Flüpke, o qual mostrou que uma chave privada para o certificado “EM OV TLS CA – G3C” da eMudhra contava com um valor de apenas 4.
Em uma resposta à Mozilla, desenvolvedora do Firefox, a eMudhra disse que identificou um erro em um script usado para gerar certificados que fazia com que um segundo conjunto de chaves mais fracas fosse gerado — as quais eram, então, selecionadas erroneamente como as chaves definitivas por terem rótulos parecidos com os das chaves corretas.
A autoridade também colocou panos quentes na situação ao afirmar que a maioria dos certificados nunca foi usada em produção e que não encontrou evidências de que o problema tenha afetado usuários finais.
Além do Safari, o Firefox e o Chrome também já revogaram esses certificados.
Ainda de acordo com o veículo, Dennis Jackson, engenheiro de criptografia da Mozilla, alertou que o utilitário embutido /usr/bin/curl do macOS poderá continuar confiando nesses certificados vulneráveis, pois o seu bundle de certificados não verifica se os certificados foram revogados.
Isso quer dizer que, caso o Mac já tenha aceitado algum desses certificados, ele continuará confiando nele até que haja uma correção — algo que só poderá ser feito em uma futura atualização de segurança.
O Google anunciou uma série de novidades envolvendo cibersegurança para o Chrome, incluindo uma nova página de aviso para sites perigosos, proteção contra ataques do tipo ClickFix e uma expansão da detecção de golpes com o Gemini.
Agora, avisos sobre sites maliciosos se dividem entre “sites suspeitos” (quando há uma avaliação com menor grau de confiança, indicando um possível risco de danos ao usuário) e “sites perigosos” (quando há uma avaliação com alto grau de confiança, indicando um risco elevado de danos ao usuário).
Para sites suspeitos, os usuários são apenas notificados, enquanto para sites perigosos o aviso é exibido em um formato de tela inteira com fundo vermelho:
Essa avaliação, feita pelo recurso de Proteção Reforçada, também ganhou novidades, já que o Google migrou a ferramenta para um novo modelo do Gemini, capaz de avaliar o conteúdo das páginas (como a marca representada ou a intenção delas) e, se necessário, enviá-lo à nuvem.
O Google destacou, porém, que o Chrome minimiza a quantidade de dados compartilhados com os servidores, analisando o texto das páginas somente quando um site apresenta indicadores de golpe com alto grau de confiança. Sempre que algo é processado fora do dispositivo, o Google afirma que não registra logs, não armazena essas informações nem treina os modelos de IA da empresa com esses dados.
Além disso, o mesmo recurso passa a oferecer proteção contra golpes do tipo ClickFix (ataques que simulam verificações CAPTCHA para induzir usuários a copiar e colar comandos maliciosos no Terminal do macOS ou no prompt de comando do Windows), detectando automaticamente quando o usuário é induzido a copiar comandos suspeitos, que são “higienizados” antes de serem enviados para a área de transferência da máquina, com a remoção de informações de identificação pessoal (PII), e encaminhados à Navegação Segura para análise adicional. Se o comando for nocivo, um alerta é exibido.
via Tecnoblog
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