from Blogger Buzz re: recent outage

I just saw this announcement from the Blogger team:

Update (5/13 7:46PM PST): Nearly all posts since Wednesday are restored, now bringing back comments from last couple days. We expect the comments to be back this weekend or sooner.

What a frustrating day. We’re very sorry that you’ve been unable to publish to Blogger for the past 20.5 hours. We’re nearly back to normal — you can publish again, and in the coming hours posts and comments that were temporarily removed should be restored. Thank you for your patience while we fix this situation. We use Blogger for our own blogs, so we’ve also felt your pain.

Here’s what happened: during scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night, we experienced some data corruption that impacted Blogger’s behavior. Since then, bloggers and readers may have experienced a variety of anomalies including intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages. A small subset of Blogger users (we estimate 0.16%) may have encountered additional problems specific to their accounts. Yesterday we returned Blogger to a pre-maintenance state and placed the service in read-only mode while we worked on restoring all content: that’s why you haven’t been able to publish. We rolled back to a version of Blogger as of Wednesday May 11th, so your posts since then were temporarily removed. Those are the posts that we’re in the progress of restoring.

Again, we are very sorry for the impact to our authors and readers. We try hard to ensure Blogger is always available for you to share your thoughts and opinions with the world, and we’ll do our best to prevent this from happening again.

Posted by Eddie Kessler, Tech Lead/Manager, Blogger

Ever since it was taken over by Google, some years back, I'd say that Blogger has radically improved in quality and service. Outages like the one we just experienced have been rare, so I'm not all that exercised about what just happened. (I do, however, think the "20.5 hours" figure has been fudged.)

Assuming the Blogger team means what it says, my "ontological stubbornness" post ought to be reappearing soon, along with the comments appended to it. If not, here's a Twitter-length summary of that post:

Fascinating, isn't it, how things never seem to go completely away: they leave residue, remainders, as if the cosmos resists change.


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