It turns out the Google Reader crew jumped into action after their alarm clocks went off this morning, restarting the service after six a.m. Pacific time, following what was an approximately eight-hour outage. There hasn't been any notice as to why the outage occured on the company's product blog, but Mihai Parparita, here and elsewhere, apologized for the outages, saying feeds should be refreshing again. And they are.The outage came at a less-impactful time for those of us based on the West Coast of the United States, but for those in Europe, India and elsewhere, it couldn't have come at a worse time, staying down throughout the day. Google Reader's news group lit up with reports around the world of frustrated techies who couldn't get their feed fix.
It's clear the redundancy held so dear by Google's mainstream apps, like search, hasn't yet trickled down to the individual apps and lab projects. For those of us who have been early adopters and made these projects part of our daily routine, we can only hope that practice is resolved shortly. Until then, we'll keep backing up our feeds, and watch for future bumps.