Blogger outage "due to gravitational anomaly"

It was the day they called "Blogday the Blogteenth". That terrible Friday when bloggers the world over realised that Blogger was down.

It may even be a sign of the end times. Bereft of their normal chance to express themselves in an arena where they can con themselves that people are paying any attention, Bloggers have been roaming Twitter like the zombies in Shaun of the Dead, forming self-help groups and support networks. Ordained ministers, journalists and grown MPs  have been seen to break down and cry in public.  Some have already set up Wordpress accounts in a pathetic attempt to feed their habit.

Blogger themselves have put this all down to "Maintenance".

But my sources in the World of Social Media (which is like the World of Narnia, only less likely) have given me more detail.

"Some people think Blogger maintenance is just routine IT stuff," said a man I shall only call 'Hugh Abthorp of 2050 Ocean Boulevard' to protect his identity. Although his colleagues know him as 'Yo! Big Surfer Dude!'. "But in fact, it's far more detailed than that.

"Naturally, we have to carry out a certain amount of routine operations - backups, re-sizing, applying OS patches, upgrading malware - all the sort of stuff you do do with any large-scale computer system.

"But it's the other stuff that's far more specialist and takes up all the time. Draining the bilge, in particular, can take quite a time on Blogger. And the build-up of vitriol can actually physically damage the system. All that acid burning into the lining of the Ego-Capacitors can eventually bring the system to its knees. We have to wash it all down, and neutralise it with the oil of Sweet Reason. And that's a really fraught job - some people suffer from logic-blindness and can't tell one from the other. So we have to label the bottles very carefully.

"And then there's the compression algorithm we use to remove redundant information. Thousands of blog posts with themes such as "All believers in God are Idiots", "Atheists don't understand us", "I'm having a tremendous problem with my lifestyle", "kittens are lovely" or "No to the Anglican covenant" can be compressed into basically one meme each with some additional meta-data for the individual posts. And we have to  clear and reload the irony, sarcasm and wry reflections caches on occasion to keep performance at an optimum.

"Of course," Hugh continued, "Other Social Networking sites have similar problems. When Twitter goes down for maintenance for an unexpectedly long period, that's normally because the tracking has gone. An ever-present issue when the users of a site are constantly veering to the left like that."

"But on this occasion, the real problem was actually a gravitational anomaly. We had a build-up of too many users whom the world actually revolves around, and we lost all stability. We've had to resort to a complete outage for a prolonged period of time as a kind of gravititational psyche correction. Or to put it brutally, we've got to show that even without the benefit of their thoughts, the sun will continue to rise regardless."

If you're reading this post, it means that Hugh and his colleagues have finished their work and gone back the beach. God bless you, Hugh.