Downtime for Blogger, Microsoft and Twitter

It's been a rough couple days for uptime, with major outages for Microsoft's Exchange Online services, Google's free Blogger hosting platform, and Twitter. Here's a roundup of the details:

Exchange Online, a paid offering that's part of Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), experienced three separate service issues Tuesday and Thursday that left customers unable to access their mail for much of the day. "We will be proactively issuing a service credit to our impacted customers," wrote Dave Thompson, Microsoft's corporate vice president for Online Services, who said the Exchange service "experienced an issue with one of the hub components due to malformed email traffic on the service." Tuesday's outage left customers unable to retrieve mail for 9 hours, while a subsequent problem Thursday led to more than three of hours of downtime. See GeekWire for more.

Blogger was offline for more than 20 hours Thursday and Friday. While the blog hostingservice is free, theoutage was felt among the service's many users. "During scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night, we experienced some data corruption that impacted Blogger’s behavior," wrote Eddie Kessler, Tech Lead/Manager for Blogger, in a blog post. "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. ... We rolled back to a version of Blogger as of Wednesday May 11th, so your posts since then were temporarily removed. Those are the posts that we’re in the progress of restoring."

Twitter experienced downtime this afternoon. "We are currently experiencing site stability issues," the Twitter team reported on its status blog. "There may be intermittent issues loading twitter.com and Twitter clients.  We’re working to fix it as soon as possible."