WordPress.com Denial of Service

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.

4 thoughts on “WordPress.com Denial of Service”

  1. Please see this comment below Andrew.

    #Mark, on February 20th, 2008 at 8:45 pm Said:

    WordPress.com users were notified via e-mail about the DoS attack.

    No-one was – sorry. It was an error in the story. But we are learning lessons from this about how we can get information to you and everyone else when events like this occur. We don’t want you to get annoyed and frustrated at us – that is not the way things should be here. And making sure there is information for you is the key part of doing this,
    I’m sorry it happened though and that we did cause you trouble.

    If you ever have any concerns email us direct at support@wordpress.com and we will get back to you.

    http://mystarbucks.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/wordpresscom-suffers-attack/#comment-3262

  2. @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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

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