WordPress.com goes down, taking out TechCrunch, GigaOm, 10.2M others

Update: WordPress.com says it’s “back running at full capacity,” as of around 3:30pm Pacific. There’s a summary here. WordPress says the 110-minute outage took down 10.2 million sites, costing them 5.5 million pageviews. Apparently an unexpected router change at a WordPress data center provider was responsible.

WordPress.com, the blog hosting service associated with WordPress blogging software, has apparently been down for about an hour. That probably affects all 9.2 million of the blogs that WordPress says it hosts.

Automattic, the developer of WordPress and WordPress.com, is posting updates via Twitter. The first message acknowledging that service was down went up at around 2pm Pacific. At around 3pm, WordPress.com posted this message from Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg: “We’re investigating the source and most expedient fix. I hope to have everyone’s blogs back & running as soon as possible.”

VentureBeat is not affected — although we use WordPress software to publish the site, we’re hosted elsewhere. However, tech news sites TechCrunch and GigaOm are both down right now.