I hadn't planned on making my blog a sounding board for all products that have had significant downtime, but this one has certainly hit close to home.Starting yesterday evening, around 8 p.m., I have been completely unable to add new posts to the site, making it appear that I am asleep at the wheel. The culprit? An issue with Google's Blogger service, which has blocked the ability to post via FTP.
This is not the first time Google's Blogger has had a outage of significant length here, and also, not the first time they have completely ignored a throe of user complaints and support requests on their site.
At a time when Wordpress and other platforms are gaining significant momentum, and can tout "5 minute" upgrades, the temptation to move, assuming the site structure and comments are retained, is extremely high.
I'd have thought Google's acquisition of Blogger via Pyra Labs would have provided the team with significant experience in growing a scalable, trouble-free infrastructure, but from conversations I've had with people close to the team, it seems that the most infrastructure-focused employees at Blogger had stars in their eyes around Google's other products, and Blogger has suffered from neglect.
Something is Broken indeed.
Update: Finally acknowledged on Blogger Status and FTP is starting to flow. But this is ... bad.
See Also:
Google Blogger: Something is Broken!
http://tinyurl.com/5sejhy
Thomas Hawk Cites Blogger Outage on FriendFeed
http://tinyurl.com/3p96y8
From August 9, 2007:
Google Ignores Users During Major Blogger Outage
http://www.louisgray.com/live/2007/08/google-ignores-users-during-major.html