Notice anything different about this post? How about that the links are orange? Yes, that’s right, I’m blogging off of CrunchGear because it’s been impossible to access our WordPress.com back-end for a little over two hours. CrunchGear is hosted on RackSpace so it isn’t affected.
WordPress.com has told our developer that the issue is an internal, programmatic error. The error seems to be affecting the entire site network, so it’s not just us but millions of others sites like Gigaom.com and people’s personal blogs (WordPress.com serves 18 million publishers). They’ve also revised the ETA for restoring service multiple times, with no fix in site.
Trying to access the TechCrunch back-end currently results in an “We’re experiencing some problems on WordPress.com and we are in read-only mode at the moment. We’re working hard on restoring full service as soon as possible, but you won’t be able to create or make changes to your site currently” error message. We’ve seen the gamut of error messages over the past three hours.
Last time we experienced WordPress issues it was due to DDoS attacks, but that is apparently not the case here. I’ve contacted WordPress.com for more details and will update this post (hopefully on TechCrunch.com) when I hear back.
Update from WordPress, not good news:
“Operations have not been successful bringing the last data center online, and stabilitizing the load in the other two data centers. Not affecting web site visitors continues to shape each action we take. Operations is carefully shifting some front end servers to act as admin servers. We’ll know if this has the desired effect in the next 20 minutes.”
Update 2: And we’re back! Looks like our CMS is working again.
