Blogger Suffers Major Outage. Bloggers Not Happy
Duncan Riley
54 comments »
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 “bX-uxu3fu,” and were unable to read their blogs, or log in to the backend. No further details are available as Blogger employees have not responded to the official Blogger forum at the time of writing with a response. We’ll update the post if we find out more.
I did try clicking on a few of the blogs highlighted as being updated from the front page of Blogger, and from five attempts I managed to visit five spam blogs, so at least some of the biggest users of Blogger don’t seem to be affected by this issue 
Update: reports that most of Blogger is back up from around 6:45pm PST. Still no word as to what went wrong.
(via Paris Lemon on Twitter, who’s blog is also down)
I will never, ever, ever use Blogger. Ever.
Why do people use Blogger when there are better services, such as Wordpress?
It’s working fine now.
Tech Slice
As i noted in the post, it doesn’t seem to be everyone, but there a comments left in the last ten minutes on the forum with ppl having the same issue, if they’ve fixed it, great, but I’ll keep an eye out because rarely are these things (particularly with something as big as blogger) fixed at the flick of a switch.
Not sure why my comments are being deleted despite me providing good tip-offs.
It happens sometimes, servers broke down… I personally use blogger, and even though it is not perfect, I think it is pretty efficient.
Use Tumblr.
Sam, simple really. Wordpress doesn’t allow advertisements unless you pay for it.
I think Blogger is the best. I believe Google can do it better.
I got the same problem in my blog. I changed the skin and it seems to work now.
Jon
I’ve got a copy of your comments to look at the story you wanted to put forward, they’re being deleted because the comment stream on this post is not where you post tip-offs. Use the contact form above or email me directly and I’m always happy to take a look, but please, don’t spam irrelevant (to the post at hand) stuff.
Sam - It’s easy. I don’t need to fart with Wordpress or another server. It does the job.
Guaranteed.. If Blogger introduced a multi-page template, turnkey 1024 size and a few other Wordpress goodies (No follow ad boxes ??!!) … It would rocket overnight to 3-4 times where it is now. (Not to mention Blogger and Feedburner like each other …)
Some of you may have read Matt Cutts’ latest post. He says wordpress is great.
Just checked the forums again, ppl still having problems by the looks of it. Funny looking at the comments, if I’d written this 3-4 years ago I would have been inundated with comments from Blogger users, but it seems today at least that not that many people use Blogger anymore, least legitimately anyway.
Yes, it seems to be some of the blogs but not all of them because I have been able to access a few in the last few minutes. Maybe not a very big problem.
But outages is something that can happen but the most important thing is to restore quickly.
I can assure you, not fixed for quite a few people yet…
But yes, it’s not all blogger blogs, but a lot.
@Duncan:
I think any blogger worth his salt is now on self-hosted Wordpress — Blogger just doesn’t cut it anymore. Not to mention TechCrunch’s tech-knowledgeable audience, so lack of pro Blogger blogs hardly surprises me.
Those misterious bx-codes…. I experienced this one recently.
I am not sure why there is so much hatred towards blogger by some because it simply was down for a little while. If this happened on a weekly basis, then hey, anger away but otherwise, I must say they have had a very good track record of being online. Same thing happened when twitter went down for a little bit… people where swearing up and down that they would NEVER use the service again… considering these are free services… I don’t get it.
Regardless of the platform you choose to share your knowledge with others, I hope this avalanche of opinions keeps growing!
Jon
http://woodmarvels.com - Create Unique Memories
I think there are regular scheduled outages for system maintenance or something. Not sure though..
Isn’t it free? The only reason to complain is if they are paying something.
Wow! I didn’t even know until I read this post. Yesterday, I was very busy all day on my blogger and didn’t notice anything? Guess it didn’t involve all bloggers?
seems to be fixed as of 9:45 pm est..
Linkedin is down, too.
@Jon
You should say the same when gmail stops working. It is not whether it is free or not. The point is that millions of people are using these services. Billions of dollars are at stake.
@Niyaz PK
Why should you blame blogger/gmail over loss of your “billions of dollars” at stake? Did you read the Terms of Service of these free internet services before you signed up?
Read:
4. General Practices Regarding Use and Storage. You agree that Google has no responsibility or liability for the deletion of, or the failure to store or to transmit, any Content and other communications maintained by the Service. Google retains the right to create limits on use and storage at our sole discretion at any time with or without notice.
re: update credit: who’s -> whose
@Sam: I use Blogger because Wordpress won’t let me edit some things that I need to change. Very simple.
Anybody know if my site was down?
So.. nothing is undownable, from google or anybody else, including p2p (skype)…
Complaining about an outage with your free Blogger account is as pointless as complaining about problems with your free Gmail account. If you’ve based your business on free tools and services and then complain when they are down for a fraction of their usual uptime - then you aren’t really that serious about your business.
The problem does not affect blogger blogs using classic templates. And there is an update on the blogger status site.
http://status.blogger.com/
Seconding EH’s grammatical correction. A misused “who’s” is like nails on a blackboard to my soul.
I have mentioned it many times on my blog, ProBloggers Matrix, and I will say it yet again to all would-be bloggers:
DON’T USE FREE BLOGS. GET YOUR OWN BLOG. PAY FOR A BLOG HOST. USE WORDPRESS.
ESTABLISH 100 PERCENT OWNERSHIP OF YOUR BLOG.
YOU USE A FREE BLOG, YOU’RE SETTING YOURSELF UP FOR FAILURE.
GET YOUR OWN BLOG!!!!!
JUST DO IT.
End of rant.
I think blogger should improve theri commenting feature, it’s not just easy like commenting other blogs, if you would like to add a comment.
I have a blogger account. Maybe I was asleep. I noticed no problems
Maybe this will convince Google to spend some more attention on Blogger, which has pretty much been ignored since it was acquired.
Interesting choice of headline - “Bloggers not happy”. What about their readers? Oh wait…
Although BLOGGER is not the best one of all tools, is good and for our aims it works. They have good tips, useful and educative.
Every blog needs a few good splogs to back it up. Keep your ‘real’ blog on your server, but you really need a few toadies that get fast indexing to give you an advantage over the 90% that don’t.
Not ethical? Well, there are a lot of us who don’t live in San Francisco and don’t have connections and will never get in TechCrunch. Unsustainable growth in San Francisco is bleeding the life out of the software industry in the rest of the country, and then we’re going to pay taxes to bail you out of the subprime mess that kept your real estate industry from collapsing three years ago.
I’ve had a crummy ole Blogger blog for many years now, and yeah–there are those occasional random bizaare “bx” codes (since google took over anyway.) I just shrug my shoulders and wait for them to go away….eventually they do….
I’m also still using my old HTML template, so that may have something to do with why I didn’t get zapped. Not converting caused me a bit of a hiccup in the beginning–and I had to re-index my blog with google and other search engines, but it’s working fine now.
and regardless of whether or not I use a crummy ole Blogger blog with a crappy blogspot extension, I’ve done pretty well for myself out here on the ole Internets. Sometimes it’s not where you blog, but who’s reading you.
Blogger is Great.. i M lovin it :p
I have no complaints yet
Google can do it much better.
Blogger is free, even if you use your own domain. No need to pay for hosting or mess around with WordPress security updates.
I like blogger hosted on my server, and there is a reason for it.
If you have multiple Wordpress blogs, on dozens of domains, whenever a new version is released (quite often sometimes) you have to update many, many installations. So for some simpler blogs, blogger is a good option.
Nuno
DeluxeCoupons.com
The food blogging community are really big users of blogger.
Wow. Normally I don’t pimp stuff, but Concentric.com has a unique clustered hosting that prevents these kind of outages. They have blogging software too.
First of all,
Blogger is ad free, where Wordpress is not.
I’d hate for the readers having to look at ads.
(And sites start blocking users of Adblock)
Second, Blogger is damn simple.
Yes, geeks want stuff to fiddle and impress
their buddies with. But the readers,
don’t give a f…k!
Look at the blogs with huge readership,
they all are ….. cut and dry and SIMPLE.
So teckies, geeks, Apple worshipers, etc. can use fancy
stuff and authors who really want to be read use blogger.
I believe Google is fiddling with the various accounts,
one can have: Blogger, Gmail, Analytics, etc.
They seem to be trying to centralize the login.
Many Firefox plugins like CustomizeGoogle,
Gmail Manager and Cookie Safe play with
cookies and for days now the Gmail login works
on and off only.
My bet, Google is centralizing login for more accurate
user profiles.
I didn’t notice this outage.
I have every faith in Google working its magic once again…
I’m one of the geeky tech-bods referred to earlier, so I’m more of a fan of CMS than a free hosted service… but then I WOULD say that, wouldn’t I?