Embarassment for Google as Blogger disruption continues

Google's Blogger platform has suffered serious disruption for over 24 hours after a scheduled piece of maintenance went badly wrong, wiping posts and leaving customers unable to publish to the blogging service.

The embarrassing turn of events began at around 6am BST on Thursday when Blogger went into read-only mode for a routine piece of maintenance.

Google then posted the following message on its status page: "To get Blogger back to normal, all posts since 7:37am PDT on Weds, 5/11 have been temporarily removed."

The company has remained tight-lipped over the possible cause of the disruption, merely updating customers via the service disruption update page and its Twitter account, and the extent of the problem remains unclear.

"Again, we apologise that this happened and our engineers are working hard to return Blogger to normal and restore your posts and comments," said a post on the service disruption page. "We will post a report once this work is complete."

At the time of writing, Google said that it is in the process of restoring all posts that were temporarily removed and that the service will be back to normal "soon".

The firm also denied claims made in some quarters that the outage was caused by problems rolling out a new user interface.

The issue will be a huge embarrassment to Google, given that Blogger is one of its most popular and high-profile cloud-based services.

The company has suffered in the past from outages to various services, most recently in February when Gmail went down for a period of time.

The Blogger outage comes at a time when cracks are beginning to appear in the infrastructure supporting cloud computing, highlighting the potential dangers of moving business-critical IT systems onto such platforms.

Amazon Web Services experienced a widespread and prolonged outage of its Elastic Block Store service in March, causing several sites including Quora and Reddit to crash.