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WordPress outage floods premium blogs with images of succulents

Some sites reverted to default themes.

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Abrar Al-Heeti Video producer / CNET
Abrar Al-Heeti is a video host and producer for CNET, with an interest in internet trends, entertainment, pop culture and digital accessibility. Before joining the video team, she was a writer for CNET's culture team. She graduated with bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Though Illinois is home, she now loves San Francisco -- steep inclines and all.
Expertise Abrar has spent her career at CNET breaking down the latest trends on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram, while also reporting on diversity and inclusion initiatives in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Credentials
  • Named a Tech Media Trailblazer by the Consumer Technology Association in 2019, a winner of SPJ NorCal's Excellence in Journalism Awards in 2022 and has three times been a finalist in the LA Press Club's National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards.
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Abrar Al-Heeti
Wordpress outage

A WordPress outage left some sites with an artsy shot of succulents. 

 Artem Russakovskii ‏via Twitter

Succulents were front and center Tuesday after a WordPress outage led some sites to revert to default themes. 

The outage, which occurred on WordPress' VIP Go platform, caused premium blogs to show 503 errors or go back to WordPress' default themes. In many cases, sites featured artsy shots of succulents before a fix was issued.

Outlets such as TechCrunch, 9to5Mac and BBC America were affected.  

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"Ok... something's wrong with WP[.]com... like really wrong," tweeted Catalin Cimpanu, a reporter at CNET's sister site ZDNet. "Sites were down for 30 minutes, now some of them have default themes. Check out TechCrunch's 'new' look."

Rolling Stone, 9to5Google and VentureBeat were also hit by the outage. 

"Big day for succulents. #WordPress," one person tweeted.

TechCrunch tweeted about the situation, saying: "We know you're wondering, so no, it's not a wild new succulent-based design direction, we're just experiencing some site issues. Hold tight."

The default themes may invoke some distant blogging memories. 

"Wordpress styles being down is a reminder that old school blogs ruled," tweeted Mike Murphy, tech editor at Quartz. The publication also appeared to suffer from the outage.

All VIP Go sites were back up and running after about three hours.