Mini Update: Blogger released a statement (click here) on what happened, which I pasted below. (In case anyone besides me was curious):
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.
Good to see/hear a friendly voice in the abyss!
ReplyDeleteTabitha: Abyss- LOL! I know! :) It was like a "blogger blackout". All these blogs relying on Blogger had no posts or way to comment. Hopefully they can restore it properly. :)
ReplyDeleteI was wondering if everything was okay with you, Alexis, since there were not any new posts for today. This blog is SO addictive! Glad to hear that everything is fine with you and its just the system having technical difficulties! :)
ReplyDeleteFirefighter Wife: Aw, you are so sweet to think of me!!! You're the best! :)
ReplyDeleteAt first, I thought I was the only one. But a quick glance on my Google Blog Reader showed that a lot of blogs, like Kelinda Kelinda, FFM, Gigi, etc. are experiencing the same thing. Oh Blogger! ;)
You're back up!! I missed JCA! :) I hope you didn't lose any of your entries. I was keeping track of the outage, what a mess. Google's going to get hit hard for this.
ReplyDeleteSo glad Blogger is back, it was feeling a bit lonely without you and your blog Alexis!
ReplyDeleteTamara: Me too! I already see that an entire post (about the MP3) is still missing. And the comments from the posts on Thursday and part of the comments on Wednesday are gone. I am hoping that Blogger can restore those. {fingers crossed} :)
ReplyDeletexoxo: You are so sweet! :) I was feeling lonely and out of the loop too.
Total abyss! I had to read emails at 5:30 am instead, boring!
ReplyDeletepathos: LOL! That doesn't sound as much fun. ;)
ReplyDeleteThese days there are backups for everything, computers in multiples with automatic failovers, redundant storage, redundant networks, etc. Programmers implementing new versions of software should always always always have a backout plan in case the implementation goes awry, usually the backout plan kicks in within a few hours. Regardless of what Google announces, I can only believe that this update was done very sloppily and hastily, the customers never being the #1 concern. Probably someone had to meet a time goal, the code or the implementation plan wasn't fully tested, the backout plan probably didn't exist. Google further neglected their customers by providing spotty and vague updates. Blogger isn't just a social network, some people make money from blogging. Google needs to come clean. OK, done ranting. :)
ReplyDeleteTamara: You made lots of great points! A lot of people rely on Blogger, so it is crappy when something like this happens. Hopefully they can restore it all. Especially since the comments from JCAs are the best part of this blog! :)
ReplyDeleteI have to admit - I was really missing reading this blog this morning. It has become part of my coffee routine! Glad to see things up and running again. Here's hoping for a fabulous new promo after the weekend....
ReplyDeleteNo kidding -- the last 24 hours or so I thought I was in the twilight zone!
ReplyDeleteOperaRach: I was missing it this morning too! I also hope there is a great new promo for this weekend. :)
ReplyDeleteRose: LOL! It did feel like that. Especially since we didn't know what was going on. I was wondering, "didn't I post something..." ;)
In case anyone is wondering, I posted Blogger's statement about what happened on the main post. :)
Great post Alexis. It was frustrating to be sure but everyone should remember Blogger is a free service with a devoted team of engineers. I can only imagine the internal strife over there right now.
ReplyDeleteJCA is back! Feelings of separation anxiety slowly subsiding.... :)
ReplyDeleteI'm a long time reader, first time poster and I have to say I MISSED YOU GUYS!! All of your thoughtful input, funny sarcasm, frustration and love you feel for j. crew adds a lightness to my day (while I wait patiently for the UPS guy to show up with my latest order!).
ReplyDeleteroxy: You are so right! :) I can't imagine what Blogger's offices look like right now. They must be running around crazy trying to patch this all up! ;)
ReplyDeleteBeyond the Blue: Me too! :)
ReplyDeleteShannon: Aw, what a great first post too! I missed you all too. :)
They're finally admitting that it was a new version of Blogger that caused the outage. Before, they were calling it "maintenance", which in the world of computing is NOT a new version of an application. They've been deceptive the entire way along. Devoted engineers? I'm sure some of them are, but the computing industry is full of sloppy coders and managers more interested in being able to check off tasks than to ensure that what they oversee is done correctly. Imagine if this were a major business, a hospital's medical records system, a NASA shuttle flight monitoring or control .... they're lucky it was just blogging, but there have been monetary loses. There really is no excuse for this.
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad you're back! It took me a few minutes this morning to realize that all my favorite blogs were missing posts.
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ReplyDelete@tamara, "maintenance" is exactly the industry terminology used whenever service-impacting work is done. When you consider revenue loss, you should also remember that Blogger is giving us hosting, DNS, content management...all for free. As someone who works in IT I can tell you that if anyone tried to set this up on their own it would not be cheap. I'm upset that my posts from yesterday are gone but even as we speak Blogger's team is working to try to restore all that data. Failures will happen no matter how much you try to prevent them. What's important is how the failure is handled, and I think Blogger's done a pretty good job both in communicating the issue and trying to get all the blogs back up as soon as possible.
ReplyDeleteI now realize how addicted I am to JCA....it seemed like the system was down forever!
ReplyDeletehere is a good example of Murphys Law: I made my first post of reviews on my blog and it was a "little" time consuming....yep the whole post is gone now. {sniffle}
It was extremely frustrating. And who knows if our posts will come back!
ReplyDeletexoxo
alexa
www.theshortandthesweetofit.com
So glad this blog is back! I thought I was going crazy or I was in the movie 'Ground Hog Day' where the day repeats itself! Still waiting for some of my favorite blogs to be 'fixed'.
ReplyDeleteSo glad we're all back online! I felt incomplete this morning without being able to read this blog and other favorites!
ReplyDeleteroxy, you make a good point that it is free and in that regard I think they did a terrific job restoring service as quickly as they did and communicating the status of the outage.
ReplyDeleteI love Blogger. I hope it's always available and always free.
roxy, I'm in the business too. "Maintenance" covers routine minor upgrades of hardware, operating systems, databases, or infrastructure software. The implementation of a new version of a top-layer application, especially a major update, is not maintenance. Google finally admitted that it was the new version of Blogger that caused the problem and they've backed it out to the prior version. They should have just admitted that in the first place, that was my point. It's best to just come clean right away, anything else can be damaging. I'm wondering how many Blogger blogs are converting to Tumblr or some other blog system as I write this....
ReplyDeleteI also want to add that "free" is never free. We are all giving up something by using free email accounts, blogs, or anything else online. Data mining and the sale of personal information is rampant. I have no doubt that in the end Google makes a lot of money off of Blogger, just not directly from the blog owners and other participants.
welcome back, Alexis and JCAs! without the blogs, what would we do?
ReplyDeletecook?
Wow I knew something was up yesterday, I posted comments on a couple of my favourite blogs and Blogger posted my full name which is private to my account.
ReplyDeleteCouldn't post this morning and I have to say I missed it quite a bit, truly this is an important part of our lives!
Thanks Alexis for giving us the whole story. When I saw JCA had reverted to a Wednesday post minus comments I knew something was up!
Have a great weekend JCA's!
Blogger hasn't restored my last two posts, which isn't the end of the world but I wonder how long I should wait before I go back and do-over. One is there, saved but not published. The other one that I was working on when blogger crashed and I had saved multiple times, is no longer there. I'll probably put up a quick post anyway, want to let people know that it's IFoFD and there are some good discounts to be had.
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ReplyDeleteThis is a little random but I want what the dollar impact is when things like blogger go down or on a broader scheme the effect of social media in general.
ReplyDeleteIn many ways the JCA blog effects my purchases with Jcrew. I will regularly check JCA before making any purchase. When I do I'm looking for reviews, sizing and often hear what others are buying and will take a second look.
Of course there is the adverse effect but I'm sure things like this blog fuel the fire more the putting it out. It is hard to picture a day when I didn't have these resources. Pretty amazing when you think of it, we are all over the US and many different countries but information spreads to all of us so quickly.
I know it was random but I had more time to think since I wasn't blogging. ; )
OT and I hope this is OK Alexis. If not, feel free to delete my comment.
ReplyDeleteThere are discounts at various stores, including Gravity Pope for my fellow Canadian JCAs (my gosh, I just called myself a Canadian - the transformation is complete!) and also other stores in Canada the U.S., all for International Friends of Fluevog Day on May 15.
See the post on my blog herethat has a link to the deals available. I had a much longer post but of course, blogger ate it. :P
I had no idea how dependent I was on Blogger! Guess reading blogs is my main form of online activity these days: school issues, weather, shopping, politics. I actually went to bed at a reasonable time last night because I had no blogs to read!
ReplyDeleteSubscribing. :)
ReplyDeleteI wish Blogger would have told us to stop updating our blogs while they updated their site. The post I had scheduled for 5p yesterday is back in draft, with information missing from it. I'm trying to wait it out and see if they restore data before I try a do-over of it.
ReplyDeleteTip - If you have your blog saved in your Google reader, your lasts post may show up there.
Gigi you are awesome! I found my post, which hasn't yet been restored, in reader. It was a long one too. Thanks for the tip!
ReplyDeleteShannon - cool!!
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