Judging from comments in the Blogger Discussion Forum, from Sunday at about 8pm to Monday at about 3pm (Central Time Zone) – Blogger was completely inaccessible by many users – mostly in the Central Time Zone in the US and Canada. That’s nineteen hours.
As one of those impacted by this outage, there are a few observations I’d like to point out. [Despite the date-stamp I used, my Amanuensis Monday post this week was delayed until Tuesday morning.]
First – It’s frustrating that there was no mention of this outage in any online newspapers or major tech newsblogs I could find. Think about this. A major blogging platform. For 19 hours many users couldn’t access it. I can’t help but think if it was the East coast or West coast users that were impacted, at least the tech blogs would have mentioned it. But since the impacted users were all in ‘flyover country’ the story was ignored. At least, that is how it looks to me.
Second – whenever something like this happens, users question whether to stay or go elsewhere. There were comments in the discussion forum from users who were saying they were finally going to take their blogs to their own domain because of this.
My reaction, however, was exactly the opposite. I’ve been there. I have a handful of personal domains. All of which have been down at some point or another. And I had to deal personally with the support staff each time. Often they are friendly, sure. They may even be friendlier than the Google Support Staff. But are they likely to get the site fixed more quickly? No. And I often have to be more hands-on with the tech support issues. I don’t really have the time for that.
Once I knew the Google team was working on the issue, I could focus on other tasks. It was frustrating it took that long, but I have no reason to believe they were dallying.
There are other blogging platforms such as Typepad, Wordpress, Posterous, and Vox. I'd probably switch to using one of those if I ever felt Google's Blogger was becoming too unreliable for me. But one major outage in the past three years is not going to convince me to jump ship.
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1 comment:
I totally agree, John. Mine was out too, but doo-doo happens everywhere. I had no doubt that the Blogger team would fix it ASAP. What amazes me most is how big a part Blogger plays in everyday life, and you don't really notice that until it's not there. It's really astounding, when you think about it, what a person can do now that they couldn't have done ten years ago. And for free!
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