Summary

Wikipedia pages are currently failing to load intermittently or consistently with an upstream connection error.

The issue affects multiple Wikipedia language domains, including both:

https://zh.wikipedia.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/

It does not appear to be limited to a specific article or language edition.

Error message

When accessing Wikipedia pages, the following error is returned:

Original error: upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers.
reset reason: remote connection failure, transport failure reason:
delayed connect error: Connection refused
Steps to reproduce
Open https://zh.wikipedia.org/
Open https://en.wikipedia.org/
Navigate to any Wikipedia article.
The page fails to load and displays the upstream connection error above.

The same behavior occurs across multiple Wikipedia pages.

Expected behavior

Wikipedia pages should load normally and return the requested article content.

Actual behavior

The request fails with:

upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers

followed by:

reset reason: remote connection failure
transport failure reason: delayed connect error: Connection refused
Affected domains

At minimum, the following domains are affected:

zh.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org

This suggests that the issue may affect infrastructure shared by multiple Wikimedia projects rather than a single language edition.

Additional information

The error appears to be generated by an upstream proxy/load-balancing layer rather than by the Wikipedia application itself. The Connection refused message suggests that the proxy was unable to establish a connection to an upstream backend.

Further investigation may be needed to determine whether this is related to:

an upstream Wikimedia service/backend failure;
a load balancer or proxy issue;
network connectivity between proxy and backend services;
a regional routing issue; or
an IPv4/IPv6 connectivity problem.

I have reproduced the issue on multiple Wikipedia domains and would be happy to provide additional diagnostic information such as curl, DNS, IPv4/IPv6, or traceroute results if required.

Timestamp

First observed: 2026-08-26 (UTC+8)

Environment
Location: Taiwan
Browser: Google Chrome
Affected projects: Wikipedia
Affected language editions: at least Chinese and English