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Errant Code Change Crashes 10 Million Blogs

The blog hosting service Wordpress.com suffered a major outage last night, affecting as many as 10.2 million hosted blogs, including high-profile news sites like TechCrunch and GigaOm.

The blog hosting service Wordpress.com suffered a major outage last night, affecting as many as 10.2 million hosted blogs, including high-profile news sites like TechCrunch and GigaOm. "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," Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg reported in the comments on TechCrunch. Most sites appear to have been offline for about an hour, but it was about six hours before the Wordpress.com team posted that operations were "back to full speed."

The downtime was the second major outage of the year for Wordpress.com, which also had availability problems for two hours in February. That outage was attributed to an unscheduled change to a core router by a data center provider.

The incident had Mullenweg reflecting on the experience of hosting TechCrunch, which posts articles whenever one of its hosting providers suffers an outage. "Mike and team at TC: you guys have jinxed us, but we still love you," Mullenweg wrote. "These past two rapid-fire incidents have been cringe-worthy and painful, and I'm sorry they both happened shortly after your switch."

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