WordPress.com goes down, taking millions of blogs (and us) with it

WordPress VIP’s slogan is “Stop worrying about downtime.” We’d really like to, actually.

Unfortunately, WordPress.com had a little issue today — which means that VIP did too — taking down VentureBeat.com, along with more than a few other tech blogs. That’s the second time in four days WordPress.com has had performance issues.

We use WordPress VIP, as do other sites like TechCrunch and GigaOm, to combine the simplicity of WordPress — one of the most popular blogging platforms in the world — with cloud hosting, and powerful customization capabilities. So do mainstream organizations like MSNBC, Piers Morgan’s site, and the official Green Bay Packers blog, all of which adds up to billions of web pages served each month.

Unfortunately, no technology is perfect … not even the cloud.

WordPress PR issued a short statement about the outage:

WordPress.com had a site-wide outage that lasted less than 5 minutes. This outage was related to a small code issue and all sites are up and available now.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, was slightly more informative — and just a little contradictory, if you check the times — on the service’s status page:

At 1:20PM Pacific there was a site-wide outage/service degradation on WordPress.com.  The root cause was idenfitifed to be some debugging code which was trying to connect to servers which had been decommissioned.  Once the issue was identified, it was quickly resolved and service returned to normal about 1:27PM.  We are in the process of auditing our codebase to ensure the same problem will not happen in the future.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

One note to keep in mind if you are running services on WordPress.com, however: the status page says that there are still some performance issues, so you may see some slowness or other problems as Automattic cleans everything up.

Image credit: WordPress VIP