TypePad, owned by Six Apart Ltd. in San Francisco, said in a statement that it experienced the shutdown during routine maintenance of its network and storage systems last night. The company would only say it experienced an 'issue' with its primary disk system where data from published blogs are stored.
'We are currently running diagnostics on the device, and working to restore your data as soon as possible,' the notice stated. 'Verifying data can be a slow process and will take time.'
TypePad said it is deploying backup copies of customer's weblogs from approximately two days ago, which is what will be displayed on blog sites, but that users will be unable to log into the site because the TypePad application is unavailable.
'We are working to bring TypePad back online as soon as possible,' the release stated.
Efforts to reach Six Apart spokeswoman Jane Anderson were unsuccessful.
The Web site had been experiencing growing pains over the past few months.
Ben Trott, co-founder and CTO of Six Apart, said in an October blog entry that the company outgrew its original data center and has recently moved over to a new facility.
"We've seen failures in our storage servers, failures that we had never seen before. We've seen a failure in a piece of networking equipment that had never failed before, and so on, ranging from hardware failures to software failures," she said in the October entry.
Trott wrote that the company is currently pushing about 3TB a day of network traffic through multiple pipes, "and that's growing by 10-20 percent each month."
Because of the problems, the company also offered its customers as much as 45 days of free service.
The company will continue to post updates throughout the day on status.sixapart.com.