Long Blogger Outage Almost Over? Google Says "Back to Normal Soon"

This morning brought a long-awaited status update on the ongoing Blogger outage, but it was extremely vague. Google is now promising that Blogger will “be back to normal soon.” The editing interface for Google’s Blogger service has been fully down for something like 17 hours now, and unreliable for longer than that.

The Blogger team is now in the process of restoring posts that had been removed during the outage. As part of addressing whatever went wrong, it had made whatever new content that bloggers had actually been able to create in the last 48 hours unavailable.

Google hasn’t explained the outage, except to say it originated from “routine maintenance” on Wednesday night. We’ve asked Google for further detail but have not heard back yet.

Blogger, which is a free service, is primarily a personal blogging platform, though some people do use it professionally. Users published more than half a billion blog posts in 2010, consumed by more than 400 million active readers, with 75 percent of traffic from outside the United States.