According to VampWillow on the wikitech LiveJournal community and the notes at the Server admin log, the server failure on Monday February 13 was caused by the physical hard disk failure on the "zwinger" server in Florida, one of Wikimedia's oldest machines. This caused problems throughout the server farm, and many servers had to be rebooted and relinked to the farm. This happened after 11pm GMT, and techs from U.S. West Coast and Australia (amongst others) were up throughout the middle of their nights to fix the problem.

Server-related events, problems, and changes included:

• 7 February — Watchlist redlinks automatically cleaned up.
• 9 February — Interwiki map protected; a vandal had used it in a minor javascript exploit.
• 9 February — Emergency CAPTCHA enabled to stop a vandalbot.
• 13 February — Downtime occurs due to a disk failure.