WordPress.com goes down, takes 9.2 million blogs with it

TheNextWeb reports that WordPress.com is currently down and affecting 9.2 million hosted blogs.

High profile hosted blogs include TechCrunch, GigaOM, CNN blogs, Redhat and Fail Blog, all of which are down at the time of writing. WordPress officials said the company was aware of the issues and that it was currently working to bring the blogs back online. On WordPress' official Twitter account an hour ago, a spokesperson commented "we're working on restoring service now".

WordPress is an open source blog publishing application that utilises PHP and MySQL. The service has seen an extraordinary rise in popularity since its introduction in 2003. According to statistics in September 2009, WordPress is being used by 202 million websites worldwide. Quantcast stats show that around 220 million people visit one or more WordPress.com blogs every month, and they view over a billion pages on those blogs.