The day I took down Wikipedia

— What are your greatest achievements?

— I took down Wikipedia. One day in 2020, Wikipedia was unreachable for a few hours, and that was on me.

Back then, I was working as a Senior Solutions Architect on the Wikimedia project — the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia. I introduced a change that caused a small performance degradation. That change went through seven rounds of code review and seven rounds of testing — everything came back green. And honestly, the degradation was so small it was basically just measurement noise. You wouldn't notice it as a user, and nothing flagged it.

Then millions of users showed up. 💥 And boom — the system went down.

Honestly, Wikimedia's processes were genuinely excellent.

I don't know exactly how many hours — maybe four, maybe eight — but they found the root cause, rolled it back, and everything was running again. Not every company can do that with something this well-hidden. 🔍

That was the first time in my life I saw it so vividly — processes were exactly why this ended in hours and not days.

You will never reach 100% protection from mistakes; they will happen.

The odds of a single engineer taking down Wikipedia were astronomically low, and somehow, that happened, and that engineer was me. 🤷

What separates strong engineering cultures from the rest is how fast you find the problem, understand it, and recover. Not whether a mistake happens at all.

So yeah — taking down Wikipedia is probably my most unusual achievement.

But hey, at least it makes for a good story! 🙂