Outages and Outrages

Blogger, the blog-publishing service owned by Google, powers Fair and Unbalanced.  For the first time since I started this blog in October 2010, there was a major glitch.  Beginning on Thursday morning, Blogger suffered an outage -- either stemming from a routine maintenance issue or related to a new format that is allegedly being rolled out.  As a result, no new posts or comments could be made for about a day-and-a-half.

So many of us have begun to rely heavily on immediate internet access, blogging and social networks that it becomes quite disorienting when we are cut off.  In this case, Blogger exacerbated the problem by providing very little in the way of status updates until this morning.  Even so,the level of vitriol from bloggers who were unable to blog was quite astounding, particularly given that Blogger is free and has had no significant difficulties in the recent past. 

Blogger is now back up, as you can tell, but there are still problems.  Fair and Unbalanced posts of the last couple of days are gone (as are drafts of other posts in the works).  This includes a piece I did on Ray Charles, an article from Tomdispatch by Tom Engelhardt, who is now allowing me to cross-post, and Fuzzyone's post on the need for Democrats to remain courageous.  (I also had a draft in the works of Great Jazz Albums #33 (Chet Baker, by the way) as well as a half-done piece on the greatest baseball teams of all time.)  Blogger says they are working on restoring these posts, so hopefully they will be back up soon.  In the meantime, I will move forward (as well as back up the blog myself).