WordPress outage hits 10 million blogs

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More than 10 million WordPress blogs were offline for nearly two hours yesterday in an outage estimated to have cost more than 5.5 million page views.

The blogging platform says the 110-minute blackout was caused by an issue at one if its data centres that brought the entire network down.

In a post on its own blog, WordPress said the outage was its “worst downtime in four years”.

“We are still gathering details, but it appears an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our data centre providers messed up our network in a way we haven’t experienced before, and broke the site,” wrote WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg.

"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,” wrote Mullenweg. “I hope it will be much longer than four years before we face a problem like this again.”

Mullenweg said there had been no risk that data would be lost, and no foul play involved: “all of your data was safe and secure, we just couldn't serve it.”

While the vast majority of WordPress' 10 million sites are small personal blogs, better-known examples of sites running off WordPress include Spotify, TechCrunch and ZDNet.

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