As of right now, I am unable to view the Wordpress.com website (Wordpress.org is up just fine). Strangely, blogs hosted on Wordpress, with .wordpress.com addresses, are still up, at least from the look of a couple I checked.
Doesn’t downtime with major websites seem to be becoming more and more regular? Twitter has been notorious of late for its frequent outages, Amazon’s cloud-based computing servers went down last week for several hours (and see here for an unfortunate combination of the two), Flickr had a nasty outage around a month ago… So far, there seems to be no connection between all these outages, but at some point you have to wonder - is there some kind of bug going around that people haven’t cottoned onto, or is it just that traffic has become so spiky that it’s almost impossible to predict peak load anymore?
Either way, it’s a reminder of how fragile online services can still be. Although I’m not an Amazon cloud computing customer, the outages at Twitter and Flickr were bad enough that I experienced both of them as a user just by needing to use the services at times when they were unavailable. Wordpress.com is similar - I never use it since I use the hosted version on my own domain, but I wanted to set up the Akismet comment spam fighting plugin and that requires my Wordpress API key, which, of course, I can only get by going to wordpress.com…
Here’s to more uptime later in 2008.
