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WordPress.com goes down for two hours, takes 10.2 million blogs with it

TheNextWeb reports that WordPress.com was down for two hours on Thursday, affecting 10.2 million hosted blogs.

High profile hosted blogs including TechCrunch, GigaOMCNN blogs, Redhat and Fail Blog, were all inaccessible for nearly two hours. WordPress officials were aware of the issues and worked to bring the blogs back online. 

Matt Mullenweg, co-founding developer at WordPress, confirmed the outage in a blog post summarising the issues, Mullenweg said the downtime was the worst the company had experienced in four years. He estimated that it had deprived the affected blogs "of about 5.5 million pageviews."

According to Mullenweg: "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."

WordPress is an open source blog publishing application that utilises PHP and MySQL. The service has seen an extraordinary rise in popularity since its introduction in 2003. According to statistics in September 2009, WordPress is being used by 202 million websites worldwide. Quantcast stats show that around 220 million people visit one or more WordPress.com blogs every month, and they view over a billion pages on those blogs.

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