The blog-hosting service is restored after being downed by a "catastrophic storage failure."TypePad, a developer of self-publishing software for Weblogs, began functioning normally at 3 p.m. PST after dealing with a "catastrophic failure" that crippled its storage system, according to Anil Dash, vice president of TypePad's parent company Six Apart Ltd.
The service had been down since Thursday night. TypePad users were unable to access the service or post entries to their blogs.
"It was one of those perfect storm moments when everything that could go wrong did," Dash said. "But now we're back up and running and there is no data lost."
Read more here about the storage glitch that brought down TypePad's blog service.
Some blogs may be showing older pages, Dash said, but users should be able to find their newest pages in the system.
"Over the weekend we will be restoring any missing photos or files you uploaded over the past several days," said a statement on the company's Web site. "We will be providing updates throughout the weekend to status.sixapart.com, and will post any major updates to Everything TypePad."
Reporter and blogger Om Malik hypothesized on his blog that TypePad was having scalability issues.
"TypePad has been growing so rapidly that it is finding the hard way that scale & scalability matter," he wrote.
TypePad was also the No. 1 result on Technorati's blog search for much of the day.
TypePad experienced scalability problems earlier this year. Dash said the recent storage problem is unrelated, and that the problem occurred when the company was trying to increase the service's redundancy.
Dash said the company has no specific plans for "making it right" with users. The company's first order of business, he said, is to determine the scope of the problem and how many people were affected.
"We have as a goal to not have any one single point of failure," Dash said. "And we'll absolutely do what's right for the customer ... They've been very good about letting us know in the past how to make it right with them."
TypePad is not the only "Web 2.0" company to experience service problems of late. Users of popular RSS service Bloglines, owned by Ask Jeeves Inc., have reported service outages in recent weeks.
The issue of scalability has also been discussed lately by Malik and development shop 37Signals LLC.
Dash said that, regardless of the debate, TypePad is committed to being a dependable business with excellent service.
Dash said TypePad plans to leverage the experience of sister company LiveJournal, which recently completed a data center move and supports many more thousands of users.
"It takes time to mature, it has to be a primary goal," Dash said when asked about service outages, both at TypePad and at other companies like Bloglines.
"Obviously, it hasn't shown with us yet. But we're happy to be part of the conversation. We're serious about being a real business."
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