Techcrunch's problem is a far smaller and simpler one than Wordpress's. Four or five ISP switches now, and it's clear with each move that they are grasping at straws, hoping to just throw money at the problem and it will go away. Websites don't work that way.
Wordpress.com has a problem that is many magnitudes more difficult and complex than just keeping one blog available.
Techcrunch could do a far better job by keeping their TTLs low, choosing a secondary datacenter site for replication. In the frequent event of an outage they just perform a master promotion, change the dns records in order to get back online quickly.
You don't have a redundant site if all of your eggs are at layeredtech. Throw SoftLayer or Equinix into the mix.