Google says data corruption led to Blogger outage

INTERNET GIANT Google revealed that data corruption during maintenance led to major outages for its blogging service called Blogger over the last four days.

During scheduled maintenance on Wednesday night Google's Blogger team encountered data corruption, which caused the service to crash for many, while others encountered severe bugs such as disappearing posts or error pages.

All Blogger users were unable to make posts for much of Thursday while Google restored the software to an earlier version before the data corruption occured. This corrected the problem, but it meant that Google had to restore posts since that date using alternative, time-consuming methods.

While the majority of users simply encountered downtime, a small number, which Google estimates at 0.16 per cent, will have encountered a number of bugs and errors that might have led to some hair pulling.

Google uses Blogger for its own blogs, so it also suffered as a result of the downtime.

The majority of the Blogger service is back online, but Google is still working on restoring comments made between 11 and 12 May, many of which went astray. Google originally expected to bring the comments back over the course of the weekend, but the problem was more difficult to address than originally thought.

Google said that any seemingly missing posts might still be available in draft form and will need to be republished. Any other incidents should be reported to Google using its bug report form.

With a spate of website and server hacks recently, including Sony and Square Enix, some Blogger users might have wondered if Google's service had fallen victim too. Google posted a status update about the issue within 24 hours, however, providing a level of communication about the downtime that Sony was criticised for not supplying.

Google apologised for the incident and thanked users for their patience. It said it will share a full incident report later this week. µ