Blogger is currently experiencing an extended outage after Wednesday’s scheduled maintenance introduced some problems. The site was taken down again at approximately 20:00 UTC on Thursday and is still unavailable to blog authors.

Blogger is running in read-only mode while the problem is resolved. This means blogs can still be visited, but authors cannot write new posts and visitors cannot submit comments.

The Blogger Status blog, which is itself hosted on the Blogger platform, has not been updated since Monday. The most recent post read, “Blogger will go into read-only mode Wednesday (5/11) 10:00PM PST for about an hour for maintenance”.

There has been speculation that the current outage was caused by a new user interface being rolled out; however, Blogger confirmed through its Twitter stream that this was not the cause.

Some users have expressed anger at losing posts and comments. A Google employee confirmed that Blogger had rolled back to a previous maintenance release, causing all posts and comments made after 7:37 am PDT on May 11 to be removed. The most recent tweet from Blogger suggests that these have only been temporarily removed.