Bloglines Down — Net Junkies Go Outside

It looks like “Bloglines” had a major meltdown in their user log-on processes around 3:00AM EDT. I’m reverse engineering this information from a “Technorati” search.

At “about 7 hours ago” people are still commenting on what they read via Bloglines, then you start seeing posts with individuals apologizing for blogrolls not working or saying that they won’t be updating their sites because they can’t access their feeds. Interestingly, because this happened while much of the Americas slept, many of the posts are in Japanese, Spanish, German, French and Italian. A bit later you see people cluing into the fact that they are not alone and that the problem is Bloglines itself. In the last hour or so posts have moved to the “Oh my God, when was the last time I downloaded my OPML file” kind of panic.

I’ll now kick off the next phase by recommending your take this opportunity to try out “Rojo” a new feed reader/social network thingy. Others seem to have had the same idea as Rojo’s servers appear to be feeling the strain of all those OPML files being uploaded.

A few observations:

  1. I couldn’t find anything on Bloglines’ site saying there was a problem. This is a big mistake and I’m sure this is the last time they’ll make it as the negative buzz is building fast.
  2. If anything weird ever happens online and you find yourself wondering “is it just me?”, remember to do a Technorati search and you’ll quickly find out if others are in the same boat.
  3. Going back in time via Technorati is a bit like taking core samples — the deeper you go the farther back in time you go, effectively building a reverse timeline.

Update: they’re back up. Official word is ”This morning, one of our user databases suffered a failure that wasn’t detected by our monitoring systems. This resulted in the inability of people to log into their Bloglines accounts. The database has been reset and no data was lost. We apologize for the issue and we’re looking at ways to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on April 16, 2005.