Today from 16:52 to 16:58 UTC we experienced issues with the WordPress.com platform, where VIP sites may have been unable to publish or save posts. The original issue is now resolved, and our systems are working through a backlog of post save/publish activity.
We are investigating the root cause and we will follow up with more information on this Lobby post as soon as it’s available.
Update at 11:08 AM Eastern: we’ve posted more detail about today’s issues in the original notice here.
Original Post: We’re aware that soon after today’s earlier availability issue was addressed, the issue occurred again around 9:50 AM Eastern. While it looks like things are recovered for the moment, we’re still investigating the root cause and attempting to prevent any recurrence.
This post will be updated with more information as soon as it’s available, and we’ll continue to update Twitter at https://twitter.com/WPVIPStatus/.
Update at 10:58 AM Eastern: We have initially identified the cause of these two incidents as a code change deployed yesterday by Automattic to WordPress.com. We believe the change unintentionally generated uncached database query activity at a level that began degrading performance, and eventually resulted in the database being unable to accept new queries, which caused the first incident where VIP sites were unavailable.
While we were able to get WordPress.com database systems to recover initially, we had not yet tracked down the code change, and so database performance again degraded to the point of being unavailable. Shortly after that we reverted the related code, which we believe will prevent any further recurrence.
We’ll review our code review process with the aim of avoiding a repeat of this situation in the future.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Update at 10:01 AM Eastern: this issue recurred around 9:50 AM Eastern, recovering by 10:00 AM Eastern, and we posted a second Lobby update noting that.
Original Update: Today around 9:05 AM Eastern there was an issue on WordPress.com that briefly affected the availability of VIP sites. All sites returned to normal operation around 9:10 AM Eastern.
We are investigating the root cause and will update this post with more information as soon as it’s available.
Our initial understanding is that this issue did not affect VIP Go sites.
If you have any questions, please contact us via support ticket.
Update at 4:44 PM Eastern: we have confirmed that it was a bug in code deployed to WordPress.com that briefly caused all sites to display server maintenance messages. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Update at 10:48 AM Eastern: all services should be back to normal operation. The issue affected all WordPress.com sites between 10:34 AM and 10:39 AM Eastern time, and after that sites began recovering. Our initial findings show that problems in code deployed to the platform caused the issue, was quickly detected by our monitoring, and was reverted a few minutes later. If you are continuing to experience any related issues please open a support ticket and we’ll follow up as soon as possible.
We’re actively investigating a service interruption to sites on WordPress.com. Most sites are currently recovering. We’ll follow up with more information on this Lobby post as soon as it’s available, and will also post updates to the @wpvipstatus Twitter account.
A reminder that we will only be offering light support coverage from September 14 to 21 (inclusive) as previously announced. We will have minimal coverage and slower response times for our deploy and ticket queues, and there will be no new theme or plugin reviews during that time.
We want to be sensitive to your business needs. If, during this time, you have an emergency request related to outages or other significant workflow-blocking issues, please open an urgent ticket and our team will follow up with you right away.
We appreciate your understanding.
PHP version 7 is a major release that brings a variety of improvements to the language. We’ve been working to bring PHP 7 to VIP and in the coming weeks we’ll provide some details about how to prepare your VIP sites and the specific timing of the update.
Until then, please begin testing your theme and plugin code against PHP 7 as soon as possible. If there are parts of your theme or plugin code that are not compatible with PHP 7, there may be serious functionality problems with any sites using that code once this update is complete.
Some of you may have already had tickets opened by our team to replace the POSIX Regex functions that were removed in PHP 7.0.0, such as:
Please make sure your development team reviews and acts on any PHP 7 tickets from VIP.
There are more changes in PHP 7 that you should be testing and verifying your code against. Some of the most common include:
Further information on the full set of changes can be found here.
Stay tuned to the VIP Lobby for more information coming soon about related changes to VIP Quickstart, how to test your WordPress.com VIP and VIP Go sites, and other helpful details. If you have any questions, please open a support ticket.
From Wednesday, September 14th through Wednesday, September 21st (inclusive), Automattic will be holding its annual company meetup. During that week, the VIP team will be spending time with our 450+ Automattic colleagues, building tools and learning from each other.
If you are anticipating any major launches or projects during that time, please let us know as soon as possible so that arrangements can be made. We will still staff our deploy and ticket queues, but please expect a slower response time. If during this time you have an emergency request, please open an urgent ticket and our team will follow up with you right away.
Thank you for your understanding. Our annual meetup is core to Automattic culture and one of our company’s most important events of the year, and we appreciate your help in making it possible.
As a part of updating WordPress.com to 4.5, we noted that a small but important change to the version of jQuery in WordPress may have affected a number of VIP themes using an outdated syntax for selectors. This would have been acceptable up to jQuery version 1.1:
$('.class a[href=#foo]');
But for versions 1.12 and on, it needs to be written as:
$('.class a[href="#foo"]');
with quotes. We’ve preemptively updated all of the occurrences of this syntax that we could find in VIP themes, on both WordPress.com VIP and VIP Go.
You’ll want to make sure the change is made in any development versions of your themes or other code where it might be in use. You should also make sure all of your dependencies are compliant with this jQuery update.
If you have any questions about this, please open a support ticket.
In the coming weeks we will be adding some new API endpoints to the WordPress.com API that will make information about custom taxonomies and their terms available. If any of your theme’s custom taxonomies are intended to remain private, you should ensure they are registered with the public argument set to false when calling register_taxonomy.
If you have any questions about this change, please open a support ticket.
This week we made some improvements to the WordPress.com VIP Zendesk support site.
Many of you open tickets primarily from the VIP Dashboard in your site admin areas, and nothing about that process has changed.
If you do find yourself logging into Zendesk to view existing tickets, you’ll notice these updates:
Soon we’ll be testing out some new features to help you get answers to your questions and resolve issues even faster.
If you have any suggestions for ways we can improve these parts of your support experience, please let us know!
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