InfoWorld reports that WordPress.com, which hosts this and many other blogs, suffered a DoS (denial-of-service) attack that began Saturday and was still preventing users from logging in or posting to their blogs on Tuesday. But the same article states that “WordPress.com users were notified via e-mail about the DoS attack.” I certainly wasn’t. Neither were other bloggers.
I’d like to see a post on the WordPress.com blog about this. A short acknowledgment that it happened would be better than nothing. Including a reminder that WordPress.com has rarely been down since it launched would be appropriate.
Please see this comment below Andrew.
http://mystarbucks.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/wordpresscom-suffers-attack/#comment-3262
@tt, thanks for pasting in Mark’s comment.
Again, I really wish that Automattic would be more upfront about this. Events like this are a fact of information technology life, and hence of web life.
For example, Amazon Web Services recently had some downtime and, as a result, so did 37 Signals and many other prominent Web 2.0 services. 37S were very careful to keep their customers informed.
I’m thinking that from what Mark said they did not have a strategic plan in place and that they will develop one now.
Up until a short while ago Automattic had a very small labor force. The addition of hanni, mtdewvirus and echo1123 as KeyMasters and, the fact that they are still advertising for even more staff is encouraging http://automattic.com/jobs/ and would be even more so if they were in evidence on the support forum.
I do agree that a notification system is needed and one would think that what comes with the territory of being whatever a Happiness Engineer is would involve both hanni and echo1123 in terms of liason with users in situations like these DoS attacks.
Folks have been asking for a notification service since nearly day 1. Just another example of how Mat and the rest of Automattic do not listen to their users.