WordPress servers crash, 10.2 million blogs affected
WordPress, a massively popular blogging and hosting platform suffered severe problems yesterday, causing some 10.2 million blogs to go offline for almost two hours. It has been estimated that 5.5 million page views were wiped, the worst outage WordPress has encountered in over 4 years.
Matt Mullenweg, WordPress founder, apologised profusely on the WordPress blog, and gave an explanation as to the crash.
“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.” He noted, stating that this problem also brought down backup procedures for the site.
“I hope it will be much longer than four years before we face a problem like this again.” Mullenweg concluded.
Thankfully, no data was lost in the outage, and all blogs seem to have resumed a normal service. However, imagine if the problem had caused a data wipe? Over 10 million blogs worth of data could have been lost. It just goes to act as a reminder of how fragile the online world can sometimes be.
One thought on “WordPress servers crash, 10.2 million blogs affected”
There’s some interesting calculations you can do with this.
If we naively assume that the two hours represents an average load then they’d have 66 million page views per day spread between 10.2 million blogs.
That would mean that each blog is only getting an average of 6.5 page views per day. Goes to show how many blogs there are out there which are abandoned, or whose content rarely gets seen.
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