Wikimedia, the non-profit foundation that operates the popular crowd-sourced online encyclopedia Wikipedia, said the outage of many of its web properties Monday morning was caused by cable damage near one of its data centers.

“The outage was due to a fiber-optic cable cut near our Florida data center,” a Wikimedia representative wrote in a Tweet. The same message, posted around 10am PDT, said the sites were mostly back up.

The organization first acknowledged there was an issue around 6:30am, saying it was having some technical issues but its engineers were working on them. The only service that was having performance issues around 10:30am was Wiki platform, everything else operating normally, according to Wikimedia’s online status dashboard.

Wikimedia leases colocation space at a data center in the Tampa, Florida, area. It also has a disaster-recovery site in Ashburn, Virginia.

The organization’s European data center is in Amsterdam.

As it does with all of its funding, Wikimedia gets a lot of its infrastructure services and funds for infrastructure as donations from companies. One of its providers in Amsterdam EvoSwitch, for example, donated €300,000 worth of bandwidth and hosting services to the non-profit in 2009.

Likewise Google gave the foundation US$2m in 2010 to expand its data center capacity.