WordPress.com Suffers Major Outage

WordPress.com, the hosted blog service from Automattic has suffered a major outage today, bringing down millions of free blogs, and a number of well known blogs.

The outage started at around 1pm US PST (8am AEDT), and at the time of writing (2:50pm PST) all sites on WordPress.com remain offline.

“VIP” sites affected include the GigaOm network, TechCrunch, and the entire Cheezeburger network.

There are reports that the front page of WordPress.com at one stage displayed the message “There was a small systems error. Please try refreshing the page and if the error is still there drop us a note and let us know,” however we are unable to get the page to load at all.

As Allen Stern at CenterNetworks points out, the outage comes less than 2 weeks since TechCrunch moved from Rackspace to WordPress.com.

More when available.

Update: back up as at 3:40pm PST.