Popular blogging service TypePad went offline on Friday with a message on the site saying that it was "working diligently to restore access".
Owned by Six Apart, it is a subscription based service, which reported that the problems occurred due to a disk failure when it was undergoing maintenance. Numerous TypePad users are still unable to access its blog management system. They also said that stories posted last week totally vanished from the system with others saying that they were unable to make any new postings on the site for three days.
Six Apart is San-Francisco based company funded by August Capital and Neoteny Co. for their service on TypePad, they charge annual fee starting from $50 a year. Besides also having a free blogging service, it sells a blogging software which can be used by institutions and individuals to install on their own Web servers.
Late on Thursday night when Six Apart was increasing redundancy on its disk space, the site conked out.
Anil Dash, Six Apart Vice President, said: “It's kind of like lightning striking. At the point where we were adding redundancy, it goes down. It was a one-in-a-million hardware problem.” He, however, claimed that no posts had been permanently lost and he assured that all missing posts would be restored as soon as possible.
However, Six Apart was unable to retrieve missing blogs by Friday evening, though the service was restored.
A blogger with the nick "Snowball" seemed unhappy with the way things were handled at the TypePad site. She said: “TypePad did nothing to notify subscribers and has not attempted to communicate in any way. It's mostly affected me by increasing my already ripe irritation with a system …I'm seriously considering moving my blog to [pMachine, Inc.'s] Expression Engine, no matter what sort of compensation they offer.”
In fact, this the second time this year that this service had a major problem. In the month of October, the service faced sporadic outages which affected its performance.
