Russia-Ukraine Crisis and WPVIP Readiness

In light of the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, we wanted to take a moment to let you know about WordPress VIP’s commitment to business continuity for our customers at this time.

Global Customer Support

WordPress VIP is a fully distributed business and our team spans more than 20 countries. We are committed to continuing to provide a high level of support operations even during geopolitical conflict.

Platform Security

WordPress VIP protects customers from attacks at all layers of our infrastructure, from our global CDN down to the code running on customer sites. Our systems continuously monitor for suspicious activity, enabling immediate automated or human response to threats. We maintain emergency and contingency plans, including redundant storage and procedures for recovering data in the event of a service interruption. More details on VIP’s security features can be found here.

User Security Advisory

We advise all customers to follow best practices when it comes to securing devices, accounts, and access to WordPress VIP tooling. WordPress VIP publishes a checklist of security recommendations that we encourage all users to adhere to.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is required for all VIP Cloud and WordPress Administrator accounts on VIP. However, we also highly recommend enforcing MFA for other WordPress roles, such as roles with post editing capabilities. To enable MFA on additional roles, please see our documentation.

If you are an administrator, we recommend auditing all privileged WordPress and VIP Cloud accounts to ensure the correct permissions are assigned and any unused accounts are removed.

Your VIP account team is here to support you. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to your VIP Relationship Manager or open a ticket via our support portal. 

Sincerely,
Steph Yiu
Chief Customer Officer, WordPress VIP

WordPress VIP COVID-19 Readiness

In light of recent COVID-19 events, we wanted to take a moment to let you know about WordPress VIP’s commitment to business continuity during this time. We place the reliability of our platform at the heart of everything we do and we take great pride in the trust you place in us each and every day.

Global Customer Support

WordPress VIP is a fully distributed business, with all of our employees accustomed to working outside a traditional office setting. Our team spans nearly 20 countries, and together with our parent company, Automattic, we have led the way on distributed work for more than 15 years. We are committed to providing our normal operations throughout this time.

Platform Availability

The WordPress VIP platform resides on our own infrastructure with built-in redundancy across more than 25 data centers worldwide. As a distributed team, our systems and automations are designed to be managed remotely by our team. We will continue to work closely with our business partners and technology service providers to ensure the same level of availability, service, and performance that our enterprise customers have grown accustomed to.

Health and Community

We prioritize the health and safety of our team, customer, partners, and local communities. For that reason, we have cancelled all work-related travel for our employees in the near future, and continue to monitor and adhere to advisories from governments and health organizations.

We deeply value our partnership with you and remain committed to providing excellent service throughout this challenging time. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to our team.

Sincerely,
Steph Yiu
Head of Support

Reminder: Light Support coverage September 11-20, 2017

This is a reminder that from Monday, September 11th through Wednesday, September 20th (inclusive), Automattic will be holding its annual company meetup. During that week, the VIP team will be spending time with our 500+ Automattic colleagues, building tools and learning from each other.

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.

Light Support coverage September 11-20, 2017

From Monday, September 11th through Wednesday, September 20th (inclusive), Automattic will be holding its annual company meetup. During that week, the VIP team will be spending time with our 500+ 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.

WordPress 4.8: TinyMCE Toolbar coming to Text Widget

As part of the WordPress 4.8 release, the Text Widget will now include TinyMCE for visual editing. By default, it will only include formatting buttons for bold, italic, unordered list, ordered list, and link.

Visual Mode

Text Mode

For many editors, this will be a welcome improvement to the Text Widget. We aren’t anticipating issues with this feature rollout, but if your team makes extensive use of the Text Widget, or customizes it, it would be good for you to review this detailed post on the change by Weston Ruter from XWP, and test your workflow.

WordPress 4.8 has been deployed to WordPress.com in small increments and will be complete before the end of this week. The text widget update will most likely go live sometime tomorrow. WordPress 4.8 will be deployed to all Go sites on Monday, June 12.

More information on the WordPress 4.8 release can be found here. More information on VIP release dates and testing can be found here. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

 

Zendesk Service Interruption

Zendesk, the service that we use for managing our support tickets, is reporting problems related to today’s outage at Amazon Web Services. These issues may be preventing tickets from being properly created and updated. Zendesk is posting status updates here and on their Twitter. We are monitoring the situation closely.

If you recently created a ticket and did not receive an acknowledgement message, please wait and resend after the issues are resolved. It’s also possible that our team’s response to any open tickets will be delayed in their delivery.

Update: The AWS and Zendesk issues have been resolved, and ticket creation/updates should be happening normally.

Resolved: WordPress.com Availability

All sites are back to normal operation. Between 8:14 and 8:24pm ET, sites on WordPress.com VIP were unavailable. VIP Go was not affected.

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 apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Join us at BigWP NYC on Monday, Dec 5!

We’re thrilled to announce that the next BigWP NYC meetup will be on Monday, December 5 at Time Inc (225 Liberty Street).

The BigWP meetup is a networking event open to developers, product managers, and editorial teams who run large, high-traffic WordPress sites. If you’re interested in attending on December 5, please RSVP here.

This meetup immediately follows WordCamp US in Philadelphia, PA. A number of folks will be taking the train from Philly to NYC to attend the event on Monday, and we’ll be gathering for co-working and lunch in New York City before BigWP. If you’re interested in joining co-working on Monday afternoon, please email me at steph@automattic.com.

If you are unable to make it to December BigWP, please consider attending the next BigWP on Tuesday, March 7 at Google NYC (111 8th Avenue). Event details and RSVP here.

As always, I’m looking for speakers at any of these BigWP events, so if you have an exciting project you’d like to share, please email me. Thanks!

WordPress.com service interruption

Update 10:55am ET: All services have returned to normal. The root cause was a switch failure in Dallas that caused some unforeseen cascading failures. This was unrelated to the issues we saw on October 5 and October 2.

Update 10:45am ET: Service should be restored for most VIP sites and we continue to work on the underlying data center issues.

Update 10:22am ET: We’re making changes to address an issue in one of our data centers. Some sites are recovering. More updates to come.

We are currently troubleshooting issues with the WordPress.com platform, and some sites may experience slow load times or errors in the meantime.

We are sorry for the trouble. We are working on the issue, have sent out an email alert, and will continue to update this post and @wpvipstatus until the issue is resolved.

If you have any questions, please email vip-support@wordpress.com.

Resolved: WordPress.com VIP Availability Issues

Update Oct 5 at 4:40 PM Eastern: On Sunday October 2nd, our Systems team handled two different Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) events on WordPress.com, one at 2 PM Eastern and another at 6:20 PM Eastern time. The source of the problem has since been blocked. WordPress.com regularly handles significant DDoS and other high-traffic events without any visible impact on our clients and users; we apologize again for the inconvenience here.

Original post: This alert is to let you know that we had a brief interruption with the WordPress.com platform from approximately 6:20 to 6:50pm ET (10:20 to 10:50pm UTC). Things are resolved and back to normal. This did not impact the VIP Go platform.

We apologize for the inconvenience. If you have any questions, please email vip-support@wordpress.com.