WordPress Creator Matt’s WordPress Blog Down

A comforting day indeed. Matt Mullenweg is the author of the popular blogging software , WordPress. He is also the founder of WordPress.com, a hosted blogging service based on WordPress Mu, a variant of WordPress. I was rather surprised to see his blog throwing the dreaded error message:

Error establishing a database connection

So what’s the big deal about it? It could happen to anybody, isn’t it?

I don’t know about you but I find it rather discomforting to find the WordPress blog of WordPress’ creator down. It’s like finding Larry Ellison’s Oracle database down. After all not only does he provide the software, an excellent one if I may add, he also provides WordPress as a service to free as well as paid customers.

The silver lining is that wordpress.com blogs are not down as far as I could see. This however brings the obvious question - Why isn’t ma.tt hosted by WordPress.com? Isn’t eating your own dog food an obvious strategy to reassure your customer?

For the technically inclined the error can happen when MySQL database becomes unreachable, due to overloading or other reasons. ma.tt appears to be hosted on Layered Tech data center, a dedicated server provider which also provides servers for wordpress.com.

BTW: Did you know Matt is unlucky in cards? Well now you know.

I wonder how Automattic is doing in this recession. Any news?

Note: WordPress is a blogging software and available from WordPress.org whereas WordPress.com is a hosted blogging service, basic service free, provided by Automattic.