Google Maintenance Update Brings Down Blogger

A scheduled Google maintenance update for its Blogger platform has seemingly brought down the search giant’s popular blogging service, with the main site now inaccessible and all blogs using the site placed into read-only mode whilst engineers work to bring the service back to normal.

On Monday, Google posted to the Blogger Status Blog (and it’s official Twitter account) to warn users that “Blogger will go into read-only mode Wednesday (5/11) 10:00PM PST for about an hour for maintenance”. The update caused issues, leaving users without the ability to post new updates and becoming unreliable over the course of Wednesday and Thursday.

Acknowledging problems with its service on Thursday, the Blogger team posted to Blogger Help Group to notify users that it would roll back the previous update, taking posts and comments from all users made after 7:37 am PDT on May 11, 2011 with it:

We are very sorry that users are unable to publish to Blogger right now. We have rolled back the maintenance release from last night and as a result, posts and comments from all users made after 7:37 am PDT on May 11, 2011 have been removed. Again, we apologize that this happened and our engineers are working hard to return Blogger to normal and restore your posts and comments. We will post a report once this work is complete.

Engineering work on the Blogger platform continued into Friday, the Google team again posting to the Blogger Help Group to notify users of its progress:

A quick reminder: in order to get Blogger back to normal, we’ve reverted back to a stable version.  All posts since 7:37am PDT on Thursday May 11 have been removed.  We’ve backed up those posts and we expect everything to be back to normal soon.

At the time of writing, the main Blogger website shows a “Blogger is currently unavailable. We apologise for this interruption in service” message, with a link back to the Blogger Status Blog. All Blogger blogs are accessible but are in read-only mode and are waiting for posts to be restored.

Google has given no indication of how long it will be until the service returns to normal, we will of course update this article to alert you to any changes in service.