WordPress boss: why we went offline
By Pulkit Sharma

Wordpress is one of the most popular blogging platforms admired not only for its quality and innovative features, but also for protecting bloggers. In 2008, China offered it a deal  Toe the official line by censoring Tibet and human rights and handover details of dissidents, and we will allow Wordpress to do business in China.

Wordpress boss Matt Mullenweg stood up to China and told reporters: “I started thinking about the DNA of the company. That sort of company is not one I would wake up every day and feel passionate about working in.”.  This courageous stand against China won WordPress millions of fans in the blogging community.

Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg even flew to India in 2009 to attend the first Wordpress camp which was part of the birthday celebrations of the Delhi Bloggers Bloc.

Wordpress also hosts a number of VIP blogs including Om Malik’s GigaOm, CNN’S Political Ticker,  Dow Jones All Things Digital, BBC’s Top Gear and many others.

Unfortunately, Wordpress had its first major hiccup in 4 years which affected 10 million blogs.  Wordpress founder Matt has blogged on what happened

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Today WordPress.com was down for approximately 110 minutes, our worst downtime in four years. The outage affected 10.2 million blogs, including our VIPs, and appears to have deprived those blogs of about 5.5 million pageviews.

What Happened: We are still gathering details, but it appears 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. 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.

What we’re doing: We need to dig deeper and find out exactly what happened, why, and how to recover more gracefully next time and isolate problems like this so they don’t affect our other locations.

I will update this post as we find out more, and have a more concrete plan for the future.

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. I hope it will be much longer than four years before we face a problem like this again.
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This honesty and transparency has got gone down very well with Wordpress bloggers.