WordPress.com Outage Takes Down 10.2 Million Blogs

WordPress.com is one of the largest blog hosting services in the world and, while no online service is perfect, it has a pretty solid track record when it comes to outages, or rather lack of outages. That all ended yesterday, unfortunately, when the entire service went down for almost two hours taking with it 10.2 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com.

"What Happened: We are still gathering details, but it appears an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we haven’t experienced before, and broke the site. It also broke all the mechanisms for failover between our locations in San Antonio and Chicago. All of your data was safe and secure, we just couldn’t serve it," Matt Mullenweg, WordPress creator and founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, explained.

The service was down for a total of 110 minutes, the worst outage in four years, says WordPress.com. It affected all regular blogs hosted by WordPress.com but also the sites hosted through the enterprise-class VIP service the company offers, including tech blogs like TechCrunch and GigaOM. As a result of the outage, WordPress.com estimates that it lost about 5.5 million potential pageviews. Everything is back to business now and the company states it is investigating the source of the problem and what can be done to avoid it in the future.

So far, the issue seems to have been with one of the data center providers that WordPress.com uses. An unscheduled router change managed to take down the entire site making it accessible to anyone. The 'backup plan' was of no use either, as the failover mechanisms were also affected by the issue. WordPress.com says it will try to see how it can assure that these types of problems don’t occur in the future and that it will be able to recover much faster in the event that something happens.