If the blogosphere was not completely awash with news of today’s WordPress outage, that might be because so many blogs that rely on the WordPress publishing platform couldn’t post.
The hours-long outage Thursday affected more than 9 million blogs that rely on WordPress. The company’s “showcase” site of top customers includes the Wall Street Journal‘s WSJ magazine, Forbes Blogs, musician Jay-Z and tech sites such as GigaOM Pro, AMD Blogs and SAP.info, among others.
The tech-industry blog TechCrunch was also down during today’s outage.
WordPress did issue a statement on Twitter, which had plenty of chatter about the outage, confirming the problem: “WordPress.com is down, we’re working on restoring service now.”
A more recent post confirmed that the service has been restored, along with the affected sites.
“We are back running at full capacity now. Closely monitoring services for any aftershocks,” tweeted Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress.
Wordcast, a news site about WordPress and social media, reported the WordPress service was restored at 3:30 pm PST.
Another social media site, Next Web, called the WordPress outage “a rarity,” but significant, with more than 9.2 million blogs affected by the outage.
The news comes as consumers and businesses are growing increasingly dependent on cloud-based Internet services, while many of the most popular sites and applications have been showing their vulnerability in the face of increased traffic and hacker attacks. Twitter has famously been knocked offline on several occasions, including a recent outage in December, and other popular online services have had their share of service disruptions, including Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
David Needle is the West Coast bureau chief at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.