Update: Matt Mullenweg responded to our email.
“The cause of the outage was a very unfortunate code change that overwrote some key options in the options table for a number of blogs. We brought the site down to prevent damage and have been bringing blogs back after we’ve verified that they’re 100% okay.”
WordPress’s hosted service, WordPress.com, was down completely for about an hour, taking blogs like TechCrunch, GigaOm and CNN with it.
The WordPress.com hosted service, which carries about 10 million blogs, experienced an outage in February. That outage was blamed on a data routing issue.
WordPress.com is run from three data centers, in Chicago, San Antonio, Dallas, with 1,300 servers between them, up from three servers in 2005.