Google's Blogger Service is Broken

Since about 2011/05/22 google's "Blogger" service (where this blog is hosted) has been experiencing serious problems. You can see a list of increasingly irate people here . It's a weird fault that hits different people in different ways. Some can't log in, some can't log out, some can log in but can't post.

I've not been as heavily affected as some, I can still log in to the website and post to my blog. However, I can't use the 'blogger api' to post from applications. Other people using blogging applications like MacJournal or ScribeFire are having the same problem.

The amazing thing is how long it's taking google to fix this, days. Also it seems to me (though I may be wrong) that this is linked to a recent decision by google to turn on 'Spam Checking' on everyone's blog comments. They didn't ask us if we wanted this turned on, they didn't suggest we turn it on, they just went and turned it on for us. They did this a while back with 'google buzz', turning it on and in the process revealing users gmail contacts to the whole world. I conclude from this (assuming I'm right about the cause) that google learns nothing from history.

But there's a bigger issue there. We're told that everything is moving into 'the cloud', that big competent companies will 'look after our data' and make thing effortless for us. You know, big competent companies like BP, or Toyota, or Enron, or Sony, or Google, or any bank, or...

These big companies aren't exactly covering themselves with glory these days. Would you really trust them with your business critical data?