Wikipedia has stopped working for some users in the UK and Europe, and a number of places in the Middle East.

The online encyclopaedia failed to load on desktops, tablets and mobile phones. 

Outages were reported shortly before 7pm, BST, according to the downdetector.com , which monitors websites. 

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The UK was heavily affected, but there were reports of the site being down in a number of other European countries, including Poland, France, Germany and Italy.     

No one was immediately available for comment at the Wikimedia Foundation, which manages the site.

It is unclear exactly what caused an outage of such an enormous scale.

It comes just months after Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp stopped working simultaneously in July.

Wikipedia also suffered an outage affecting hundreds of users in September 2017.

The online encyclopaedia is used widely across the world.

There are Wikipedia sites in 300 different languages, with some 46 million articles accessed by 1.4 billion unique devices every single month, according to figures from 2018.

Wikimedia, is a charitable foundation that runs entirely on donations.

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There are fewer than 300 full-time staff worldwide, nine of them in the UK.

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