Yesterday, about 10.2 MILLION blogs fell off the face of the planet for just Under 2 hours when WordPress.com experienced it’s first major outage in four years.  In all, about 5.5 million pageviews lost in those 110 minutes of downtime.

According to Matt Mullenweg, the downtime was caused by an unscheduled “core router” change at one of WordPress.com’s datacenter providers.   I find it fascinating that a core router change at one data center broke failover mechanisms that should have shifted services over to another working DC.  True to Automattic’s slogan, “Inspired by you, Striving to create good, Nothing is perfect.”, it seem someone was less than perfect in designing their failover system… and then forgot to test it.

This one seems rather minor, but could be an issue for some sites.  WordPress 2.9.2 fixes a problem with registered users being able to “peek” into your trash.  Nothing I’ll be getting my panties bunched up over, but since the upgrade process is like 2 clicks and a password, just do it!

The fine folks over at WordPress just released what they’re calling a “hardening” upgrade.  Version 2.8.5 doesn’t have any new features, just some code improvements to make sure you’re WP site stays safe…

As you know over the past couple of months we have been working on the new features for WordPress 2.9. We have also been working on trying to make WordPress as secure as possible and during this process we have identified a number of security hardening changes that we thought were worth back-porting to the 2.8 branch so as to get these improvements out there and make all your sites as secure as possible.