WordPress VIP Outage Downs Several Sites, Some Returning with Default Themes

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If you just landed on your favourite website and realized it looks weird without their regular theme or its completely down, WordPress is to blame. There has been an outage on the WordPress VIP platform that downed several sites for like half an hour and for the sites that returned, their custom theme was ditched for a default theme as seen above.

Automattic confirmed the technical issue pointing it to service interruptions on VIP Go sites. VIP Go runs the commercial side of the blog hosting platform WordPress.com. Sites are experiencing 503 errors with missing theme files.

Sites affected include:

  • Venturebeat
  • TechCrunch
  • Quartz
  • 9to5 sites – 9to5Google, 9to5Mac
  • BBC America
  • Electrek
  • Wikimedia Foundation company blog
  • DroneDJ

Automattic is telling site owners not to make any changes through the Themes page as they’ll likely be lost or cause the site to load a default theme.

The company is rolling out a fix across the VIP GO platform to solve these issues and says that sites should slowly begin to recover.

What they’re saying

Enterprise support for Automattic, Jeremey DuVall:  “Sorry for the trouble. We are working on the issue, and will follow up with another alert once this is resolved.”

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