Affected areas: Some question of the week posts, mostly older ones.
I am aware of the fact that some pages cannot be pinged. This is caused by a bug in WordPress that causes the cache of the objects to record as ping and comment closed while the database says that they are still open.
I don’t know who broke what but I am working as hard as I can to identify what has gone wrong. Currently, I’m looking at the WordPress object cache which is where the problem seems to be coming from. A fresh call to the database gets the correct data.