AC360º Blog in Peril

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Mega web host WordPress.com goes down and takes millions of websites with it

Posted on 3:14 pm, Thursday, June 10, 2010.

Millions of blogs and other websites had this message today.









or this message


Software publisher Automattic, which runs WordPress.com, went down today and took millions of blogs and other websites with it. Sites down were WordPress.com hosted websites, VIP WordPress sites (like Anderson Cooper’s CNN Blog), link shortener WP.me, WordPress.tv, Automattic.com and probably more.

Automattic’s founder Matt Mullenweg’s personal website ma.tt was still online along with other Automattic websites:

• WordPress.org
• bbPress.org
• BuddyPress.org
• Gravatar.com
• PollDaddy.com

Mullenweg’s Twitter feed seems to indicate that he is travelling and he even linked to posts a few minutes before the outage while everything was still running. http://twitter.com/photomatt

WordPress.org software installations on private servers were not affected by the outage. Domain name registrar GoDaddy was attacked with malware on Tuesday (June 8) which infected a number of WordPress installations hosted on them. Today’s problem at WordPress.com was not a security issue according to founder Mullenweg.

Automattic has been working on WordPress 3.0 which is expected to come out this month. So far Automattic has not reported if a roll-out of 3.0 on WordPress.com caused the problem.

WordPress is a popular web publishing software, Hawaii 24/7 is powered by WordPress, and WordPress.com runs a special multi-site version of the software which hosts millions of separate sites under one roof. When that roof came down today it took out the many websites housed under it.

Update #1: An official message from WordPress.com states, ‘We are working on restoring WordPress.com as quickly as possible.”

Update #2: From WordPress.com Twitter account, “We’ve isolated the issue on WordPress.com, and we are working on a fix.”

Update #3: From Mullenweg on Twitter, “The vast majority of blogs are back up, bringing up the rest over the next few minutes after we verify them. There were/are no security issues, it was an internally-created bug.”

Update #4: From WordPress.com Twitter account, “We’re focused on blogs right now — the ones still down, then home page, then stats, in that order.”