Editor’s note: This article was first published in May 2011, reporting that week’s Blogger outage of 13-14 May 2011. “At the moment” and “over the last few hours” refer to those days.
At the moment, the problem that hit Blogger appears to have been fixed, although content was lost on every blog that published anything on Wednesday.
The incident on the world’s largest blogging platform began on Wednesday night, when Google scheduled a period of downtime to carry out maintenance work. During that time, the service allowed blogs to be read but not updated. The update ran into trouble, however, and from then on blogs could be viewed, but it was not possible to publish new posts or see the ones published since Wednesday, when the update failed.
According to the Blogger team on Twitter and in the platform’s forum, the outage was solely due to “problems with a routine maintenance update.” The company’s managers insisted that they worked the whole time to “roll back” the maintenance release.
As a result of the incident, the photos and comments that all users posted after 7:37 a.m. on 11 May 2011 “were removed,” including any changes made to blogs, as Blogger’s managers admitted. They posted a steady stream of messages on Twitter apologizing for what had happened and assuring users that their engineers were “working hard” to get back to normal and restore the posts and comments.
Early on Friday afternoon, Blogger confirmed on Twitter that it had “started restoring the temporarily removed posts,” although everything published on Wednesday, and any changes made to blogs, have simply disappeared.
Over the last few hours, various theories about the cause of Blogger’s problems have circulated online. Given the current climate, many people think Blogger may have suffered an outside attack, although Google says it was just routine maintenance that got complicated at the last minute.
Now all kinds of criticism is being aimed at Blogger. Even though my own blog was one of those affected, we should understand that the platform provides a service, and no company is immune to mistakes, because there is a team of people behind it. Frankly, some bloggers’ comments have been out of proportion; we shouldn’t forget that WordPress also suffered an outside attack.
At times like this, I think we should be a little more forgiving.
Featured image: Sham Hardy, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
