Google's blogging and online publishing service, Blogger, has been suffering from something that is all too familiar to one of its main rivals, Tumblr: the service has been down since around half past noon PDT and has yet come back up. Google put all blogs on read-only, meaning users can view blogs hosted with the service but owners of those respective blogs cannot login, update, or manipulate their sites in any way.
Wednesday night, at 10pm PDT, the service went down for about an hour and a half for regularly scheduled maintenance. It seems issues sprung up from whatever transpired behind the scenes, as Blogger's status blog continues to read: "Blogger will be in read-only mode while we resolve some maintenance issues. Sorry for the inconvenience."
In an effort to rid itself of any errors and get the site back online, posts and comments made after 7:37am PDT on Wednesday, May 11th, until the downtime when into effect have effectively been lost, the company stated in a support forum.
We have rolled back the maintenance release from last night and as a result, posts and comments from all users made after 7:37 am PDT on May 11, 2011 have been removed. Again, we apologize that this happened and our engineers are working hard to return Blogger to normal and restore your posts and comments. We will post a report once this work is complete.
Blogger recently began slowly rolling out a complete redesign to its site but the company says that the new look had nothing to do with the downtime.
Update: At around 10:32am PDT today, Blogger came back up after more than 20 hours of downtime. Blogger, in a post, stated that "what happened [is] during scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night, we experienced some data corruption that impacted Blogger’s behavior." All posts that were made for those aforementioned 30 hours are only "temporarily" lost and the company is now in the process of restoring all of that content. They estimate other users, less than 1%, will experience problems with their specific accounts.
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