Update on TypePad Issues
Here is an update on the current issues we're experiencing with TypePad. — Most importantly, we want you to know that your blog data is safe. We have no reason to believe that any of your posts, comments, TrackBacks, photos or files have been lost.
Context & Ripple Effects
TypePad has had a rough autumn: Six Apart published its own account of the ups and downs of running a fast-growing service in late October, and days afterward users reported TypePad appeared blocked from inside China. This December 16 update lands mid-outage, with the company leading with the reassurance users care most about — that no posts, comments, TrackBacks, photos or files have been lost.
The story traveled beyond the platform's own channels quickly: Om Malik picked up the incident the same day under the frame of "the Web 2.0 hit by outages," treating TypePad not as an isolated glitch but as one more data point in a cluster of availability problems at consumer web services. That framing matters because it shifts the question from "is this fixed" to "can hosted platforms be trusted at scale."
First-order effects
- TypePad's paying bloggers spend the outage unable to publish while relying entirely on Six Apart's assurance — confirmed by the company — that all stored content remains intact.
- Six Apart absorbs a concentrated support and communications burden, having to update users repeatedly rather than resolve the underlying issue outright.
Second-order effects
- Each extended incident hands bloggers a reason to evaluate self-hosted or rival platforms, since the alternative to trusting a host's backup claims is controlling the data yourself.
- Om Malik's same-day grouping of the outage with other Web 2.0 failures raises the reputational cost for every hosted consumer service, since buyers increasingly price reliability into platform choice.
Third-order effects
- If the 2005 pattern of clustered outages at hosted services holds, data custody and exportability become structural differentiators in the blogging market, pushing hosts toward explicit guarantees about what happens when the service — not the user — fails.
The trend: As Web 2.0 consumer services scale through 2005, availability incidents at hosted platforms like TypePad are turning reliability and data ownership into the central terms of the hosting decision.