NEW YORK - Popular subscription-based blogging service TypePad went offline on Friday, delaying updates to thousands of sites. Users of the system were unable to post new stories, and posts written in the last week disappeared entirely.
The shutdown occurred late Thursday night as Six Apart was increasing redundancy on its disk storage. "It's kind of like lightning striking. At the point where we were adding redundancy, it goes down," says Six Apart Vice President Anil Dash. "It was a one-in-a-million hardware problem." No posts have been permanently lost, and missing items should be restored shortly, he says. Dash would not say how many users the outage had affected, saying only that it had hit millions of Web pages and thousands of users. By Friday evening the service appeared to be up and working, but missing blog posts had not yet been restored.
A blogger who calls herself "Snowball" was one of them, and says the outage and the way it was handled are causing her to think about switching hosts for her site The Adventures of A Snowball In Hell.
"TypePad did nothing to notify subscribers and has not attempted to communicate in any way," says Snowball, who preferred not to give her real name. "It's mostly affected me by increasing my already ripe irritation with a system that is falling far short of the expectations of those of us who have been there from the beginningÂ…I'm seriously considering moving my blog to [pMachine, Inc.'s] Expression Engine, no matter what sort of compensation they offer."
This is the second time in recent months that TypePad has had service problems. In October, the system was plagued with intermittent performance issues. Six Apart fixed the problem and awarded users with credits for free service. Dash says the current outage is unrelated.
San Francisco-based Six Apart is a privately held company funded by August Capital and Neoteny Co. Their service is available to subscribers who pay a yearly fee, which starts at about $50 per year. Users are provided with hosting for their site and a Web-based interface where they can enter their posts. (Disclosure: Forbes.com uses the TypePad service to power its blogs, including one by the author of this story.) Six Apart also operates LiveJournal, a popular free blogging service, and sells Movable Type, blogging software which companies and individuals can install on their own Web servers. Both products were unaffected by the outage.
Six Apart was founded by husband and wife team Ben and Mena Trott, who developed the Movable Type weblogging software as a hobby. It became one of the most popular tools on the Internet, and in 2002 the Trotts created Six Apart. In October 2003, they launched TypePad and in January 2005, the company acquired Danga Interactive, operators of LiveJournal.
On Monday, the company announced a deal with Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ), under which Yahoo! Web Hosting now offers Movable Type software. More than 10 million users worldwide use the company's services, but competition has become more heated, and includes Google's Blogger, Microsoft's (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) MSN Spaces, weblogs from Xanga Inc. and even open source software such as WordPress.
Author and cartoonist Scott Adams, who operates The Dilbert Blog, says he's received a lot of e-mail from readers regarding the problem, but considers it only a minor setback. "It has no real financial impact on me. And I'm not the angry-getting type," he says. Nor does he think Six Apart needs to do anything this time to make up for the outage. "If they prorated my subscription fee, I think they owe me 85 cents or something like that."
The shutdown did have commercial impact on many others, though it is hard to quantify. Many bloggers put post advertisements from services such as Google's (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) AdWords, but revenue for all but the most popular sites are usually on the order of pennies per day. But weblogs owned by corporate clients were also affected. Online job search company Monster Worldwide (nasdaq: MNST - news - people ) operates a TypePad blog full of career advice. "Monster learned about the TypePad outage this morning and has been affected by it," the company said in a statement. "While we are disappointed at our inability to keep our blog current at this time, we understand that technical glitches do happen. We are confident SixApart is on top of this and will do what's best for its customers."
Ernest Svenson, the author of Ernie The Attorney, a weblog that features personal musings on law and politics, says he's sure Six Apart will take care of its users. "In the past Six Apart has been reasonable about outages and making up for it, so I expect them to do the same thing this time," he says. "I know that they have a strong sense of the blog community, so I am not too upset."
Other TypePad users aren't so forgiving.
Dennis Dunleavy, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Southern Oregon University, is the author of a blog called The Big Picture. He discovered the problem when he went to post a new entry on Friday morning, and says it's also making him rethink his TypePad subscription. "At this point I'm getting a little concerned," he says. He's considering switching to Google's Blogger service.
Six Apart's Dash says he understands users concerns but says the problem was an isolated one, and that the company will make it up to their customers. Nor is he too worried about angry users. "The only people you get mad at are the people you care about," he says. "It's the holiday season, it's the time for fighting with family."
