One of the Internet's most popular blogging destinations suffered a major outage Friday. TypePad, the blog hosting service run by Six Apart Ltd., was largely out of service from 11 p.m PT on Thursday night until about 4 p.m. Friday afternoon.
Some blog content was restored from backup tapes early Friday, but the backups did not include content posted in the past two days, Six Apart spokeswoman Jane Anderson said. That meant for much of the day, most blogs looked out-of-date.
But by Friday afternoon, the site was "all the way back," Anderson said. Some recent posts needed to be re-published, however, and some files were apparently still temporarily lost in the digital shuffle.
"Over the weekend we will be restoring any missing photos or files," SixApart said in a statement on its site. "We have no reason to believe that any of your photos or files have been lost."
TypePad is used by the popular social networking site Friendster to provide blogs and Anderson said Friendster users may have beeen affected by the outage. Users of LiveJournal, a different blogging site owned by Six Apart, and of the company's blog authoring software Movable Type, were unaffected, however.
Six Apart's TypePad service is used by some MSNBC.com blogs; they, like other TypePad blogs such as those at the Toronto Star newspaper and one written by Dilbert creator Scott Adams, displayed old content for much of the day Friday.
This is not TypePad's first bout with trouble. In November, access to the site was intermittently interrupted for several days while the company was moving to a new data center. The firm refunded consumers' subscription fees after that incident.
The exact cause of Friday's outage was not immediately known, but on its Web site, Six Apart blamed "an issue with our primary disk system where data from published blogs are stored."
Anderson declined to specify how many users the privately held Six Apart has, but published reports when the company acquired LiveJournal in January, 2005, put the combined user base at around 7 million. On Monday, Six Apart announced it had inked a partnership with Yahoo Inc. in which Yahoo would act as the preferred supplier of Movable Type for small businesses.