WordPress falls down for nearly two hours

WordPress has apologised to users for a two-hour outage

WordPress blogs were inaccessible yesterday for nearly two hours, depriving affected blog owners of about five and a half million page views, the company admitted this morning in a blog post.

The downtime was the worst in four years, WordPress said, and affected over 10 million blogs.

The company laid the blame on one of its datacentre providers, which it claims had "messed up" the network and "broke the site" by carrying out an unscheduled change to a core router.

"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," said WordPress.

"I know this sucked for you guys as much as it did for us. The entire team was on pins and needles trying to get your blogs back as soon as possible."

WordPress users seem to have been very understanding, and many left comments thanking the company for fixing the downtime so swiftly.

"I for one truly appreciate your transparency about this problem. We all have things happen and nothing works 100 per cent of the time. But it's a rare organisation that will step up, own it and learn from it," commented 'Shamballa9944'.

A user called 'Stemp' added: "Sh*t happens. That's the first outage I had to experience on wordpress.com. It's not bad."