Blogger Suffers Major Outage. Bloggers Not Happy
Google's Blogger hosted blogging service has suffered a major outage this afternoon (PST) with [Spammers] bloggers flooding forums to complain. — Users affected by the outage were presented with a Blogger error message that included the code …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is at least the third hosted-blogging failure in the corpus: Six Apart's Typepad outage in December 2005, and Google's own Blogspot downtime last August, plus a Google Reader outage in June 2007. The pattern is consistent — free, centrally hosted publishing goes down, and thousands of writers lose their audience simultaneously with no fallback.
What makes this recurrence pointed is timing: Google staff joined the DataPortability.org Work Group just a week before this outage, so the company is publicly endorsing data portability while its own flagship hosting platform demonstrates why users want an exit path.
First-order effects
- Bloggers on Blogspot lose their publishing and their traffic for the duration of the afternoon outage, with only an error code and forum complaints as recourse — the same helplessness Typepad users faced in 2005.
Second-order effects
- Every outage hands self-hosted alternatives like WordPress a sales pitch: the interop between blogging tools debate from 2005 exists precisely because repeated hosted-platform failures make exportability and multi-tool redundancy a buying criterion rather than a technical nicety.
Third-order effects
- If hosted platforms keep failing while preaching portability, pressure builds for industry-standard data export and cross-platform syndication — the structural answer to single-vendor publishing risk that DataPortability.org was formed to push.
The trend: Hosted consumer web services are accumulating outage track records fast enough that data portability is shifting from developer ideal to mainstream user demand.