Wikipedia appears to be experiencing severe technical problems, with users around the world unable to access the site's main page and article pages lacking images or stylesheet information. Pointing a browser at "en.wikipedia.org" currently throws up a boilerplate error message advising users that the problem "should be fixed soon" and the site's status dashboard is littered with red and amber warnings.

A separate but unverified statement posted in the site's IRC channel gives more detail: "Wikipedia is currently down due to networking issues. No ETA is known at the moment. If you want to browse the wiki, please try other tools such as Archive.org and Google Cache." Meanwhile, a message from the @wikimediadc Twitter account suggests that the outage is being caused by problems in the site's Tampa data center:

Predictably, the rest of Twitter has gone wild over the news.

Update: Roughly 50 minutes after the first outage reports at around 9:30 ET, most of the site is now functioning. Article pages are displaying images but still lack stylesheets.

Update 2: As of 10:50 ET, normal functionality for end users appears to have been completely restored, with both the main page and article pages displaying correctly. The latest statement from IRC is as follows:

In recovery from downtime due to networking issues. Main sites back up, some still in recovery. Apologies for the inconvenience. For the current status, go to http://status.wikimedia.org