Friday, February 19, 2010

WordPress.com: Router Change Broke The Site

Matt Mullenwag, the founder of Automattic, the operator of the hosted blog site Wordpress.com, told the site's users that the 110 minute downtime Thursday--which affected 10.2 million blog sites--was due to an unscheduled change to a core router at one of its data centers. Mullenwag said the downtime was the firm's worst in four years, and affected both normal and VIP blogs hosted by the firm. Among other failures, Mullenwag said the router changes broke its failover mechanism between its locations in San Antonio and Chicago, and deprived the blogs hosted on the sevice with about 5.5 million pageviews.