Millions of users of Google Inc.'s (GOOG) blog publishing service were not able to access or publish with Blogger for most of the day yesterday. No, it wasn't a Playstation-like event where Sony was prompted to shut the gaming site after hackers stole millions of credit card and other personal information from member.

The 20-hour outage at Blogger was due to data corruption during scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night.
"Nearly all posts since Wednesday are restored, now bringing back comments from last couple days. We expect the comments to be back this weekend or sooner," Eddie Kessler, Tech Lead/Manager of Blogger, said in a note titled "Blogger is back."

Mr. Kessler added in his note, "What a frustrating day. We're very sorry that you've been unable to publish to Blogger for the past 20.5 hours. We're nearly back to normal - you can publish again, and in the coming hours posts and comments that were temporarily removed should be restored. Thank you for your patience while we fix this situation. We use Blogger for our own blogs, so we've also felt your pain."

Mr. Kessler explained that during scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night, Blogger experienced some data corruption that impacted the site's behavior. Since then, bloggers and readers may have experienced a variety of anomalies including intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages. On Thursday, Blogger was set to pre-maintenance state and placed into read-only mode.

"We try hard to ensure Blogger is always available for you to share your thoughts and opinions with the world, and we'll do our best to prevent this from happening again," Mr. Kessler said.

Blogger was started by a tiny company in San Francisco called Pyra Labs in August of 1999 in the midst of the dot-com boom. Pyra Labs was acquired by Google under undisclosed terms in February 2003. At present, Blogger is one of the world's most popular blogging platforms and has millions of active blogs.