WordPress Outage Takes Us and 10.2M Blogs Out for 2 Hours - GigaOM
As we are hosted on WordPress.com through their VIP enterprise publishing service, we were affected by an outage of their network of blogs today that%u2019s been attributed to a core router change. All GigaOM sites (besides GigaOM Pro and OStatic, which are hosted independently) were down today from approximately 1:30 to 3:30 PT.
Automattic founder and frontman Matt Mullenweg explained in a blog post after the sites came back up that the company%u2019s 10.2 million hosted blogs were down for 110 minutes, for a projected page view loss of 5.5 million. He attributed the downtime, Automattic%u2019s worst in four years, to %u201Can unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers.%u201D Mullenweg said the problem %u201Cbroke all the mechanisms for failover between our locations in San Antonio and Chicago.%u201D He assured users that all their data was safe and promised a %u201Cconcrete plan%u201D to better handle such situations in the future.
WordPress being down was only the latest of an outbreak of outages this week affecting us or companies we work closely with %u2014 given pretty much all of Palo Alto had no power yesterday after a plane crash and then our office Internet and phones (we are based in San Francisco) went out yesterday. It seemed almost fitting (but nonetheless frustrating) when our sites went down. We joked that it was due to rogue reporters%u2019 illicit use of Chrome for Mac, which doesn%u2019t seem to get along with WordPress.com, so we%u2019ve been kindly reminded not to use it over and over again by our lead developer. (Sorry Chancey!) All you cloud haters out there can feel free to voice in about how dumb we are for trusting a hosted service.
All joking aside, I found it surprising that Automattic users %u2014 the majority of whom use its services for free %u2014 seemed to be fairly forgiving in the comments to Mullenweg%u2019s apology post. It seems the company has enough goodwill to spare a couple hours of failure. But one thing%u2019s for sure, people won%u2019t be so friendly if it happens again.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req%u2019d): The 5 Biggest Cloud-Computing Stories of 2009
Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.
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