Blogger Returns After Strange Error

Posted on January 17, 2008

Blogger blogs returned online earlier today after a major two-hour outage. The Blogger status blog says many of Blogger's blogs showed the error bX-uxu3fu.

This afternoon, many blogs showed the error bX-uxu3fu for about two hours. This was caused by a bug in our latest release that affected highly-customized Layouts templates. We noticed the problem as soon as the release finished deploying, and worked quickly to find and fix the bug.
We apologize to the bloggers and readers of the affected blogs.

Blogger added support for three new languages today - Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew. This also included some new layout templates which may have caused the strange error.

Paris Lemon was one of the first to report the Blogger outage on his Twitter account. Paris Lemon blogs that after he tweeted the news Duncan Riley at Techcrunch wrote a story about it and within 30 minutes Blogger was fixed.

And let this be another lesson in the fine uses of Twitter. I wrote a tweet a couple of hours ago to let people know Blogger was down but I could not write about it for obvious reasons, and Duncan Riley of TechCrunch picked it up, wrote a post, and within 30 minutes everything was fixed. Nice teamwork.

The folks at Blogger may very well have seen the TechCrunch article that resulted from Paris Lemon's tweet and moved more quickly. The Blogger people were probably also watching these complaints on the Blogger Help Group. If your blog host goes down it doesn't hurt to tweet about it on Twitter. You will probably get someone's attention - maybe even the attention of a major tech blog like TechCrunch.