Not too long ago I read about many WordPress (which is the authoring platform for this website) plugins being vulnerable to attacks that could inject malicious code or bring down a site. Nothing happened to this one, so I figured it was too small to be a target. However a Saturday update to the Jetpack plugin, which is used extensively on this site and adds significant functionality, borked the whole site and rendered it inaccessible with the following error:

Jetpack crash

As you can see, something is terribly wrong with Line 31.

I called support, and I had to be transferred to “Advanced Support,” which sounded bad, and after about 45 minutes the guy said it was a problem with GoDaddy, the hosting provider, and they would fix it then send a notification it was fixed. As time went on , and it wasn’t fixed, I began to think I had been blown off.

On a side note, I had even FTPd (remember FTP?) in to my account so I could delete the Jetpack folder, but I was told it was a GoDaddy issue, not a Jetpack issue, and not to delete the folder. When I called in today, though, I was told it *was* a Jetpack issue. So they deleted it on their end, which allowed me to log back in, reinstall Jetpack, and now the site appears to be operational. If you’re interested, here’s what the FTP program, FileZilla, looks like when I’m connected: That’s my local drive on the left and the remote is301 folders on the right. FTP gives folder- and file-level access to a remote drive.

Connecting to is301.com via FTP

No one’s information is compromised, there was no security risk to anyone so I don’t want you to be concerned about that. Hopefully everything will be fine from now on, but please let me know if you notice anything amiss, and I – or at least GoDaddy – will get on it.