Friday, March 11, 2005
In the past several days, we've had a bout of stability problems with Blogger. Yesterday morning, users were encountering errors when trying to login and access their blogs.

During this time, mail-to-blogger was temporarily disabled in an attempt to resolve some of the difficulties - it is once again back on, altho' message processing may be delayed. Additionally, we are working on a patch to fix a bug that has prevented many users from leaving comments today.

Most of these problems were caused by an increased amount of load on the blogger.com application servers. We have addressed this problem by increasing the number of machines that serve the site. However, there is more work to do. In addition to bringing on more machines and completing additional capacity planning, we are also working to identify and correct problematic database queries. These queries are poorly optimized and lead to the increased load that jeopardized the service in the past few days.

As a Blogger user, I completely understand how unacceptable the performance has been in the past few days and it is the focus of the engineering team to fix these issues.