Lengthy Outages for WordPress.com, Netflix

It must be the SuperMoon. Several widely-used Internet services experienced lengthy outages today.

More than 18 million blogs WordPress.com were down for several hours Tuesday night. "A fix for a server issue caused a series of failures," Automattic reported on its Twitter feed. "Recovery is in progress but taking longer than expected." Among the sites affected was TechCrunch, which indicated that the WordPress.com team was having challenges with load balancing between data centers as they restored servers. Sites operated n read-only mode for some time before service was fully restored.

The Netflix web site and streaming service were unavailable for several hours Tuesday night. The downtime left the company's left millions of subscribers without access to their queue or the ability to stream movies. "We're sorry, the Netflix website and the ability to instantly watch movies are both temporarily unavailable," read a message on the Netflix.com web site. Netflix spokesman Steven Swasey told CNET the company's technicians were busy trying to get the site operating again, but he did not know the nature of the problem.