WordPress Outage Takes Millions of Blogs Offline
If you've ever wondered what the Internet would be like without blogs, the world got a small glimpse of it yesterday when a network problem at WordPress caused 10 million blogs to go offline for two hours.
WordPress.com is a blogging platform that powers millions of blogs, both professional and personal, worldwide. The company said that "an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers" caused the entire site to go down, taking millions of blogs with it.
Founder Matt Mullenweg said this was WordPress's "worst downtime in four years."
The company emphasized that security problems were not an issue in this case. The site had not been hit by hackers or brought down by a distributed denial of service (DDS) attack, a common tactic that has brought down the sites of major corporations in the past.
"All of your data was safe and secure, we just couldn't serve it," Mullenweg said on the company blog.
Surprisingly, WordPress users seemed remarkably calm about the loss of service, despite WordPress estimates that users lost a total amount of 5.5 million pageviews in that two hour period. Many users posted comments to the effect that WordPress had provided such good service thus far that they wouldn't begrudge the company this failure.
That didn't stop WordPress from getting anxious about the downtime.
"I know this sucked for you guys as much as it did for us," Mullenweg wrote. "The entire team was on pins and needles trying to get your blogs back as soon as possible. I hope it will be much longer than four years before we face a problem like this again."
So do millions of WordPress users.
