Wordpress.com Blogs Back After Outage

The Wordpress.com blog hosting service has been offline this afternoon, causing downtime for more than 10 million blogs. "We're investigating the source & most expedient fix," Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg posted on the service's Twitter account. "We hope to have everyone's blogs back & running as soon as possible."

UPDATE: As of 6:20 p.m. Eastern time, prominent sites hosted on Wordpress.com were beginning to come back online after about two hours of downtime."We are back running at full capacity now," Mullenweg reported at 6:30 pm. "Closely monitoring services for any aftershocks.

UPDATE 2: Matt has provided more info on the Wordpress.com blog. "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," he reports. "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. 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."

The Wordpress.com service is hosted by Layered Technologies, with much of  its infrastructure housed in the provider's Chicago data center (see video). Wordpress.com hosts about 10.2 million blogs.