How WordPress.com Outage Brought Down 9.2 Million Blogs

WordPress has been down for Over an hour taking down approximately 9.2 Million blogs, yes that’s not the readers but the number of blogs.

TechCrunch, which had recently moved on to WordPress’s cloud along with GigaOm, and other popular blogs are all equally impacted.

Update: WordPress.com is back for good. It was long one about 110 minutes. More info after a break. More info at bottom

However, the wordpress team is well-aware and hard at work attempting to get things back up and running. But this brings bad news for all those bloggers who are using inbuilt comment system that relies on akismet to prevent spam.

There’s no word on what caused the problem but as mentioned, there are over 9.2 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com (see chart below). It’s seen an exponential rise over the past 4 years with thousands of new blogs still being added every day.

The impact is highest we have ever seen, more updates on this, stay tuned.

Update: WordPress has the official word on it:

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.

What we’re doing: We need to dig deeper and find out exactly what happened, why, and how to recover more gracefully next time and isolate problems like this so they don’t affect our other locations.

I will update this post as we find out more, and have a more concrete plan for the future.

I know this sucked for you guys as much as it did for us — 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.

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