Fear not, those of you who haven’t migrated over to the WordPress environment because Blogger.com and all of its services is back. After a substantial outing, Google’s blog service is operational once again, and deleted posts have begun returning.

While it may not be as robust as other clients, Blogger’s user base is still considerable, so much so, in fact, Alexa refers to Blogger.com as the fifth most popular site in the world based on three-month observation. Granted, this includes traffic to Blogger.com blogs, but the point remains – there are a lot of Internet users who access Blogger.com content.

As for the outing, it lasted for 20.5 hours and was caused by apparent data corruption. Some posts and comments were removed, as well as leaving Blogger.com members without any editing or content creation capabilities. The Blogger Buzz post has further details:

…bloggers and readers may have experienced a variety of anomalies including intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages. A small subset of Blogger users (we estimate 0.16%) may have encountered additional problems specific to their accounts. Yesterday we returned Blogger to a pre-maintenance state and placed the service in read-only mode while we worked on restoring all content: that’s why you haven’t been able to publish.

Over at the Blogger Status blog, a post from 06:07 PDT reveals the process of restoring content was underway. At 10:32 PDT, Blogger.com was given the “all clear/all systems normal” status, meaning posting could resume like normal.

From my (very) brief interaction with the Blogger.com backend, the first thing noticeable was it takes a few moments to connect. While this could be a connection issue on my end, nothing else is connecting slowly, expect Twitter. Apparently, the maintenance is on-going, but the service is indeed functional.