Google runs a lot of the electronically stored data for people these days. Beyond file storage in the new Google Docs, users get their email, schedules, to-do lists, and a wide field of other information from Google’s servers. It’s a little surprising, then, that Google has had so many major issues – not, perhaps, in the sense of scale, but certainly in severity. The most recent “case in point” example of this is the Blogger glitch that occurred on Wednesday May 11th and saw resolution on May 13th.
Blogger’s Tech Lead, Eddie Kessler, explained what happened. “During scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night, we experienced some data corruption that impacted Blogger’s behavior.” More specifically, “bloggers and readers may have experienced a variety of anomalies” from May 11th through 13th. Those “anomalies” came in a number of forms, with a few of the common experiences for bloggers and readers including: being redirected to the wrong blog, having issues logging in, having posts vanish, having comments disappear, and not being able to access Blogger at all. Additionally, for nearly a full day Blogger users were unable to make new posts.
The Blogger tech team managed to restore the ability to create new posts, but they did so through restoring the May 11th version of all blogs, thus eliminating any new posts, comments, layout changes, etc., made on the 12th or 13th. Blogger then proceeded to restore the additions made by users on the 12th and 13th, a process which was concluded on the evening of the 13th.
Surprisingly enough, vanishing information that is slowly but surely restored is a near hallmark for Google services. Similar issues occurred with Google Calendar and Gmail earlier in 2011.
[via the Blogger Buzz]
