6 ms·

WordPress.com Goes Down, Takes Millions of Blogs With It

44 points by dwynings 16y ago

RyanMcGreal 16y ago
So kind of a long-tail problem, then.
bl4k 16y ago
Wordpress is one of the largest sites on the web now - I can't believe they have a single point of failure
- moolave 16y ago
  If it was server storage related, then we don't mind helping them out =)
  - tszming 16y ago
    They use Amazon S3 for storage in the past, not sure if it is still valid for now.
    - moolave 16y ago
      Then I hope we can help them if given the opportunity. The site is working so far. Thanks for the feedback, folks. http://moolave.tk/ http://moolave.tk/
  - bl4k 16y ago
    I have been in this situation with high profile sites before. When there is downtime that is very public like this incident, you get a flood of emails and calls from service providers offering to help. This can actually often work, a relationship I established with a particular hosting provider (who I introduced to numerous other people as well) started out during a downtime incident when an executive of the company sent an email. If you are a startup that offers services, I would recommend taking advantage of these opportunities to get new business (put on a good pitch at a time when the potential client is vulnerable).
  - jeff18 16y ago
    Ironically, I am trying to go to your site to see what you do and am getting the following error: Error Request-URI Too Large The requested URL /... is too large to process.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - mike-cardwell 16y ago
      And when I try to view http://moolave.tk/ http://moolave.tk/ in Firefox I just get a message saying: This content cannot be displayed in a frame. To protect your security, the publisher of this content does not allow it to be displayed in a frame.
      - m0tive 16y ago
        I also got NoScript's cross-site scripting filter kicking in which is never a good thing...
        moolave 16y ago
        Thanks for the input. For some reason it works on Chrome and Firefox on my side. I will check and see what I find.
      - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
        It works for me but seems to be a weird structure of a regular site hooking in a google sites frame which bootstraps a wix flash page which frames the actual site content.
        moolave 16y ago
        Yes, we designed the website from the Wix Flash platform and published it on Google Sites. We still have to make some changes as the right-hand side is taking some space on high-resolution screens.
    - 16y ago
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Could be an unpredicted cascading failure. 24x7 is very hard. I am glad air-traffic control does not rely on Wordpress ;-)
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
joe24pack 16y ago
I wonder if the continuous development/deployment model that they use is somehow responsible.
- kvs 16y ago
  "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." TC http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/10/wordpress-gives-us-the-vip-treatment-goes-down-on-us-again/#IDComment79548453 http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/10/wordpress-gives-us-the-vip-...
lukeqsee 16y ago
We think central hubs are great -- till they fail. We are always shocked when they fail, but shouldn't be. We expect perfection from a single entity. We can't. Maybe it's time to change our focus.
- pyre 16y ago
  The bonus of a single entity is that they can afford to hire experts to solve various problems that it wouldn't be feasible for smaller groups to hire/solve. (e.g. Lots of people prefer to have their email done by a provider rather than spend untold amounts of time configuring exim/postfix/qmail/sendmail/etc, in addition to setting up spam filtering, managing blacklists/whitelists/greylists, solving issues when your domain and/or IP ends up on one or more blacklists, etc) Not that I'm necessarily a fan of significantly centralizing things, but for some things I can see the appeal of off-loading the complexity onto someone else.
- stoney 16y ago
  It's an interesting risk trade off. The central hub is complex but well resourced so able to solve problems quicky (hopefully), self hosting is perhaps a simpler overall solution as it is smaller scale (so less chance of a failure?) but you probably don't have the same man power to deal with a crisis. Which is more likely to suffer an outage? Which is more likely to suffer a long outage? Which is more likely to suffer a fatal outage?
  - drusenko 16y ago
    Totally agree. It's incredibly easy to criticize a central hub for any downtime whatsoever because the impact is so large and visible. But your criticism is completely baseless if the average downtime on a central hub is less than the average of a self-hosted solution.
    - mseebach 16y ago
      When your self-hosted blog goes down, it's usually your own fault. I guess that's probably more acceptable to hackers than when it's somebody else's fault, and all you can do is sit and stare at generically worded status updates on Twitter.
tjmaxal 16y ago
Yet another great reason to self host
- techiferous 16y ago
  ...if you have better uptime than wordpress.com.

44 points by dwynings 16y ago

RyanMcGreal 16y ago

So kind of a long-tail problem, then.

bl4k 16y ago

Wordpress is one of the largest sites on the web now - I can't believe they have a single point of failure

moolave 16y ago
If it was server storage related, then we don't mind helping them out =)
- tszming 16y ago
  They use Amazon S3 for storage in the past, not sure if it is still valid for now.
  - moolave 16y ago
    Then I hope we can help them if given the opportunity. The site is working so far. Thanks for the feedback, folks. http://moolave.tk/ http://moolave.tk/
- bl4k 16y ago
  I have been in this situation with high profile sites before. When there is downtime that is very public like this incident, you get a flood of emails and calls from service providers offering to help. This can actually often work, a relationship I established with a particular hosting provider (who I introduced to numerous other people as well) started out during a downtime incident when an executive of the company sent an email. If you are a startup that offers services, I would recommend taking advantage of these opportunities to get new business (put on a good pitch at a time when the potential client is vulnerable).
- jeff18 16y ago
  Ironically, I am trying to go to your site to see what you do and am getting the following error: Error Request-URI Too Large The requested URL /... is too large to process.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - mike-cardwell 16y ago
    And when I try to view http://moolave.tk/ http://moolave.tk/ in Firefox I just get a message saying: This content cannot be displayed in a frame. To protect your security, the publisher of this content does not allow it to be displayed in a frame.
    - m0tive 16y ago
      I also got NoScript's cross-site scripting filter kicking in which is never a good thing...
      - moolave 16y ago
        Thanks for the input. For some reason it works on Chrome and Firefox on my side. I will check and see what I find.
    - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
      It works for me but seems to be a weird structure of a regular site hooking in a google sites frame which bootstraps a wix flash page which frames the actual site content.
      - moolave 16y ago
        Yes, we designed the website from the Wix Flash platform and published it on Google Sites. We still have to make some changes as the right-hand side is taking some space on high-resolution screens.
  - 16y ago
rbanffy 16y ago
Could be an unpredicted cascading failure. 24x7 is very hard. I am glad air-traffic control does not rely on Wordpress ;-)

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

joe24pack 16y ago

I wonder if the continuous development/deployment model that they use is somehow responsible.

kvs 16y ago
"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." TC http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/10/wordpress-gives-us-the-vip-treatment-goes-down-on-us-again/#IDComment79548453 http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/10/wordpress-gives-us-the-vip-...

lukeqsee 16y ago

We think central hubs are great -- till they fail. We are always shocked when they fail, but shouldn't be. We expect perfection from a single entity. We can't. Maybe it's time to change our focus.

pyre 16y ago
The bonus of a single entity is that they can afford to hire experts to solve various problems that it wouldn't be feasible for smaller groups to hire/solve. (e.g. Lots of people prefer to have their email done by a provider rather than spend untold amounts of time configuring exim/postfix/qmail/sendmail/etc, in addition to setting up spam filtering, managing blacklists/whitelists/greylists, solving issues when your domain and/or IP ends up on one or more blacklists, etc) Not that I'm necessarily a fan of significantly centralizing things, but for some things I can see the appeal of off-loading the complexity onto someone else.
stoney 16y ago
It's an interesting risk trade off. The central hub is complex but well resourced so able to solve problems quicky (hopefully), self hosting is perhaps a simpler overall solution as it is smaller scale (so less chance of a failure?) but you probably don't have the same man power to deal with a crisis. Which is more likely to suffer an outage? Which is more likely to suffer a long outage? Which is more likely to suffer a fatal outage?
- drusenko 16y ago
  Totally agree. It's incredibly easy to criticize a central hub for any downtime whatsoever because the impact is so large and visible. But your criticism is completely baseless if the average downtime on a central hub is less than the average of a self-hosted solution.
  - mseebach 16y ago
    When your self-hosted blog goes down, it's usually your own fault. I guess that's probably more acceptable to hackers than when it's somebody else's fault, and all you can do is sit and stare at generically worded status updates on Twitter.

tjmaxal 16y ago

Yet another great reason to self host

techiferous 16y ago
...if you have better uptime than wordpress.com.