Blogger blogs hosted at Blogspot.com have been down for hours. There has been no news from either Blogger or Google (who owns Blogger) about the outage. Rumors are starting to fly about a DNS attack. Blogger’s status page is inaccessible, but it looks like you can still login and even update. At any rate, the scroll of updated blogs seems to be moving — none of the blogs I tried to click on from the scroll is up. I don’t recommend posting or changing your template, as I imagine your posts will disappear into the ether. If you go to Google and type in the URL for the status page, you get this teaser:

Blogger Status. Friday, February 03, 2006. We are currently experiencing some problems with Blog*Spot. A percentage of blogs are completely inaccessible. …

The Google cache for the page is from January 26, so that’s no help.

Lots of educators host their blogs through Blogspot. Just thought some of you might be wondering what was going on. I’ll post updates if/as I get them.

Check out Bloggers Blog for more (I can’t help but think there needs to be an apostrophe in there…).

Update: Blogger’s status page is now visible and has this message:

Saturday, February 04, 2006Blogspot is again experiencing problems – we are investigating.

Posted by Eric at 16:04 PST

I have checked out a couple of Blogspot blogs, and they seem to be up (for now).

Second Update: The status page is now blank with just the word “ok” in the corner.

Final Update: Logged in this afternoon, and Blogger’s status page apologizes for the outages and explains that the problems were too widespread to keep users aprised of the issues. They assure users they are taking steps to prevent this in the future. At 8:00 P.M. PST most of Blogspot was restored, save one of their filers, so some blogs were still inaccessible and could not be updated. I did notice that two blogs I tried to read returned a 403 Forbidden error. By 11:00 P.M. PST the server had been restarted and all the blogs except for “some legacy users have domain associations between Blog*Spot and external domains” were again available. As of this last update, “these associations are not functional at this time.”