# The day I took down Wikipedia

Published 14 April 2026

[Originally posted on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7449791320329547776/)

— *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! 🙂