Welcome WordPress 4.4!

WordPress released a new major release a few days ago. Say hello to "Clifford", more commonly known as WordPress version 4.4. It's billed as a forward looking release that makes your content shine.

WordPress' latest version offers more connectivity, making it easier for your content to be shared as well as being able to include content from other sites and services with the new embed features.

 Responsive and standards-driven, WordPress 4.4 makes all your images responsive so they'll look good on any device or screen size.

WordPress 4.4 also brings with it a new default theme, TwentySixteen. It's "mobile first" with a fluid grid design, ensuring that your blog or site  looks good on all devices.

All that said, 4.4 is a major release. A major release is meant to introduce new features  which may also introduce new bugs. Sometimes it takes a few days or even weeks for all your plugins to be compatible with a new release. Check with each one of your plugins to verify they are compatible before upgrading a major version.

We strongly recommend you re-read our WordPress upgrade guide and follow the recommendations.

In short:

Minor releases should be applied automatically or as soon as possible; they won't "break" anything.
Major releases should be applied manually, after being tested on a development site and all plugins checked for compatibility. A major release could possibly break something, which is why you need to test first.
Themes and plugins should be manually updated, after testing and checked for compatibility.

If all of this is confusing and seems like too much work (it can be and it is), check out our WordPress Update Service. For only $25 a month we'll take care of all your WordPress updating headaches, and provide you with an ongoing list of what's been updated and when, in case you notice any issues after an update. We also create a test site to test any plugins and themes for compatibility before updating on your live site, so there's never any surprises.

Outgoing Email Issues [Resolved]

We're investigating an issue with outgoing email from the server. All incoming email is being queued (held for delivery), but one of the processes that "sends" email is stopped and is refusing to restart.

We are working diligently on this issue and expect to have it fixed very soon.

3:22 PM PDT: The issue has been resolved. It was a network issue and nothing to do with the server.

[RESOLVED] Network Issues

There are some network issues plaguing the data center where our servers are located, services have been up and down for the past hour, with even the data center's websites and support portal unreachable. Everything is back up now, and hopefully it will stay that way. It could be from a very large DDoS attack or network hardware issues.

We apologize for the disruption and will continue to monitor the situation.

Outgoing Email Issues [Resolved]

We're investigating an issue with outgoing email from the server. All incoming email is being queued (held for delivery), but one of the processes that "sends" email is stopped and is refusing to restart.

We are working diligently on this issue and expect to have it fixed very soon. I suspect this was caused by an update from last night, as other admins have reported the same issue in the cPanel support forums. More updates as they are available.

UPDATE 5:47PM All issues have been resolved. Last night cPanel and PHP were upgraded (the PHP upgrade was a small security update). On cPanel servers PHP is upgraded through a cPanel process called EasyApache.

Something in EasyApache apparently changed the permissions on several directories in user accounts, which I caught and fixed at the time. It also changed the permissions on the /tmp directory, which just about everything uses to temporarily write to while it's processing (think of it as a "working directory"), including email. The permissions need to be set as to securely allow other processes on the server to write to the tmp directory.

All email that was being held for processing should be on it's way to you now. We apologize for this issue, we know how important it is to receive email in a timely manner.

Server issues

We're investigating an issue with the server, details as they become available.

UPDATE 8:29 PM We're back up. If I had to guess (which I do have to, because the data center isn't being forthcoming about WHAT is going on there), I would guess that this was related to the ongoing network upgrades they're doing. But in my opinion, that's no excuse for the amount of downtime we've experienced in the last few months, and certainly not without proper notice.

UPDATE 10:20 PM We've migrated to a new hardware cluster to avoid any further issues. If this doesn't solve the issue, then the next step will be migrating to a different data center.

Network Issues

There is a network issue at the data center. Engineers are currently working on the issue, and I will post more information on their progress as it becomes available.

Thank you for your patience.

Update 8:47pm PST I haven't been able to pry much information on what's going on from the techs at the data center, but I did get this much:

Our team is currently working with engineers to correct an I/O degradation issue that is occurring during an upgrade of the Reston, VA data center cluster system software. We hope to have a resolution shortly, and appreciate your patience as this issue is addressed and resolved.

--- UPDATE ---

We are still making progress as our engineers correct the issues experienced during the upgrade process, and to bring affected customer environments back online. Again, thank you for your patience during this time.

So in a nutshell, they were upgrading the network and something went wrong. likely they had to power the entire system down to do the repairs, then bring it back up again, a little at a time. Websites run on PHP or HTML are displaying correctly, but any sites that require a database connection/MySQL (WordPress, forums, our support system) are down. I've tried restarting the MySQL server, but they have everything locked, so there's nothing more I can do.

The engineers are working on the problem, and it shouldn't be too much longer. Please check this status blog for updates. This blog should always be your first stop when there's a major server incident. Thank you for your patience.

Update 9:27pm PST  MySQL has been successfully restarted. Our support ticket system is back up. All account databases are being checked and repaired as necessary.

Update 9:50pm PST All databases have been checked and repaired as necessary. If you notice any database errors, please submit a support ticket.