As widely reported, Automattic’s wordpress.com blogging service—used by a number of high-profile blogs and news outlets—was down for almost two hours yesterday.

According to a post on the company’s blog by founder Matt Mullenweg, the downtime—which caused a loss of an estimated 5.5 million page impressions—was caused by a change to the network configuration of one of the data centres that the blogging platform uses. Mullenweg says that “it appears an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers messed up our network in a way we haven’t experienced before, and broke the site,” bringing down such high-profile clients as technology news blog GigaOm (where a somewhat acerbic Liz Gannes has commented that, much to her surprise, “it seems the company has enough goodwill to spare a couple hours of failure.”

Comments on Mullenweg’s post were indeed fairly forgiving, with the majority of posters alternately complimenting the company for its honesty in dealing with the news and asking whether the downtime was the result of some sort of attack, to which Mullenweg answered simply that “there were no hacks or denial of services attacks.”