Blogger Blames Data Corruption for Outage

By Chloe Albanesius

Blogger on Friday blamed data corruption for a bug that took down the service for more than 20 hours.

Service has since been restored, and users should be able to publish once again. Blogger is still in the process of restoring some posts that were temporarily removed due to the glitch.

"Here's what happened: during scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night, we experienced some data corruption that impacted Blogger's behavior," Eddie Kessler, tech lead and manager of Blogger, wrote in a blog post. "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 number, which Kessler put at 0.16 percent, encountered problems specific to their accounts.

In the wake of the trouble, Blogger on Thursday returned the site to a pre-maintenance state and put everything in a read-only mode, so users couldn't post to their blogs. That was a pre-May 11 version, so posts published after that were temporarily removed. Blogger is working now to restore them.

"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," Kessler wrote.

The outage comes about two months after Blogger rival Tumblr said a human error had "caused some sensitive server configuration information to be exposed."