Millions of WordPress.com blogs, along with blogs on WordPress’ VIP hosting service took a tumble on Thursday for about an hour, when a sudden outage came about.
The countless websites displayed the “WordPress.com will be back in a minute!” notification, much to the dismay of users, including those shelling out big bucks, such as TechCrunch and GigaOM for WordPress.com VIP hosting. WordPress top-dog Matt Mullenweg personally tweeted the following shortly before the outage ended:
“The vast majority of blogs are back up, bringing up the rest over the next few minutes after we verify them.”
According to Mullenweg, the cause of the outage relates to a “very unfortunate code change that overwrote some key options in the options table for a number of blogs.” What the purpose of that code change was we do not know at this time.
This is the second major WordPress.com outage this year, the first of which took place in February.