Blogspot Down
Blogs hosted with Google's Blogger are down right now (like the official Google blog, for instance). A search for [site:blogspot.com] returns around 34.5 million blog pages, which all seem to be affected. Someone by the name of Pete who says he's a Blogger engineer in a Google group states:
Context & Ripple Effects
The outage lands on a platform already fighting a reputations problem: in March 2007 PC World reported that Google's blog software had been hijacked by scammers, and back in 2005 trackers were already mapping how much of the splogosphere was fake Blogger content. Today the reliability side of that ledger took its turn — every blogspot.com page indexed, roughly 34.5 million of them per the site search cited, went dark at once, including Google's own official blog.
InfoWorld picked up the story the same day, so this is visible well beyond the blogosphere it broke. What's notable about the response channel: a purported Blogger engineer posting under the name Pete is answering users in a Google Group — there is no dedicated status surface being pointed to.
First-order effects
- Millions of Blogger-hosted publishers lose both their publishing tools and their readers simultaneously, since serving and editing run through the same downed infrastructure.
- Google's own corporate blog goes silent along with everyone else's, leaving the company communicating about its own product through a forum thread instead of the channel it controls.
Second-order effects
- Every hour of downtime hands rival hosted platforms and self-hosted setups a sales pitch they didn't have to write: your voice lives on someone else's uptime.
- Traffic- and ad-dependent bloggers absorb lost pageviews directly, which converts a technical incident into a revenue event for the platform's most commercial users.
Third-order effects
- When tens of millions of nominally independent blogs sit behind one operator's infrastructure, platform reliability stops being a vendor detail and becomes an industry-wide story — the same concentration logic that made the spam problem systemic now applies to outages.
- Incident communication itself becomes part of the product: responding piecemeal through user forums invites expectations that large hosting operators will need formal status channels.
The trend: Hosted blogging is consolidating millions of independent publishers behind single infrastructures, making each platform's uptime and incident response a structural concern rather than a per-blog nuisance.