- Image via CrunchBase
For the over 10 million bloggers on the WordPress platform, exciting times never seem to end. The largest self-hosted blogging platform in the World had just beaten all its rivals by announcing the upgrade of its mobile application for the iPhone and the introduction of mobile apps for the Android and Blackberrry. Proud WordPress bloggers would now be able to write posts (save drafts or publish right away), moderate comments, blog photos from their mobile phones (and video on Blackberry!).
Download WordPress mobile applications for your Platform here.
Unfortunately the excitement generated by the launch of these mobile applications was soon to be replaced by fear and uncertainty as a core router change at one of the oprganisation’s data centre providers (on 18 February) caused network problems which knocked over 10 million WordPress blogs offline in a two hour outage resulting in the loss of about 5.5 million page-views.
However, Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress.com attempted to calm bloggers by releasing a quick statement that although this event was WordPress’s “worst downtime in four years..it will be much longer than four years before we face a problem like this again”. He also stressed that this was not a security breach and WordPress.com had not been hacked or hit by a denial of service attack.
Talking Point
This is a reminder to bloggers that no Web hosting or application platform is exempt from mishaps. If it happens to WordPress, it can happen to anyone. Thankfully the network bug did not result in any loss of data on the part of bloggers, however, the importance of making back-up a priority cannot be over-emphasised.