The internet was covered in succulents on Tuesday afternoon thanks to a WordPress bug.
Several popular websites experienced technical issues after a major outage involving the web hosting service. Sites utilizing the WordPress VIP Go platform either crashed Tuesday or had their homepages changed to a default theme showcasing a potted plant.
Some of the sites affected by the issue include 9to5Mac, 9to5Google, BBC America, Drone DJ, Electrek, Rolling Stone, TechCrunch, and VentureBeat.
Twitter users began questioning the plant’s sudden appearance shortly after the issue began.
what’s going on with the rolling stone website pic.twitter.com/ID5pkbNxLV
— meow (@EmileeLindner) June 11, 2019
https://twitter.com/danielkindra/status/1138505009375485952
WordPress confirmed that it was aware of the problem on Twitter and said that a fix was in the works. Some sites began coming back online shortly after the announcement.
We’re continuing to work on availability issues for VIP Go. Sites may still be experiencing 503 errors and missing theme files. Updates will be shared here on Twitter and on this Lobby post: https://t.co/UiG6N2DCv0
— WPVIP Status (@WPVIPStatus) June 11, 2019
Jeremy Duvall is the support team lead at Automatic, the company which owns WordPress. He released a statement apologizing for the outage.
“We’re currently experiencing issues affecting sites hosted on the VIP Go platform,” Duvall said. “Sorry for the trouble!”
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