Search-engine giant Google"s Blogger blog publishing and Blogspot blog hosting services went offline earlier today. Among the organizations affected by this apparently widespread outage was Google itself, which hosts its official company blogs on Blogspot. This comes on top of a growing wave of complaints posted by Blogger publishers on the official Blogger discussion forum since Monday, who report problems editing, publishing, and accessing blogs. Things apparently took a turn for the worse this morning, Eastern Standard Time, when Blogger and Blogspot apparently went totally offline.
Checks on Blogger.com and a variety of Blogspot-hosted blogs by IDG News Service staff in different parts of the U.S. and Europe returned server error messages, confirming reports from users in the Blogger discussion forum. Blogger and Blogspot came back online at around 11 a.m. EST, with the outage apparently lasting over one hour. Google didn"t respond to a query on Tuesday about the complaints piling up in the discussion forum, nor did it reply to a request for comment today about the service"s outage.