Feedblitz causes FeedBurner crash?
Written on January 22, 2008 – 10:25 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Yesterday I read a post (can’t find it!) that explained how to get more subscribers to your RSS feeds. One tip was to show the amount of subscribers to your readers once that amount gets above 300. If you have more than 300 readers, they argued, that would show that you have a serious blog and that would make it more interesting to follow. In the previous two weeks we quickly grew to 3000+ subscribers so yesterday we included the Feedburner counter in the menubar here.
Unfortunately Feedburner is experiencing some trouble since Sunday. At first an error at FeedBlitz caused a spike in some Feedburner accounts of more than 200%. At ProBlogger the subscriber count leapt from around 39,000 to 41,000 and then to 100,000 subscribers. We haven’t seen such dramatic changes but Feedburner did stop updating all feeds altogether on Sunday.
A lot of blogs now depend on Feedburner to give some insight to the popularity of their blogs even more than visitor stats and page impressions so Feedburner not working is bad news. Unfortunately Feedburner hasn’t been giving any information about these problems. The last post on the Feedburner blog is from November 04, 2007. There is some discussion going on in the Feedburner forums about the inflated numbers though.
Feedblitz announced that their problems will most likely be fixed by Wednesday for most people and my guess is that Feedburner will start working again then too. Still, in this age of transparency it is strange that Feedburner hasn’t been communicating more. It seems that these problems started over the weekend so they have had plenty of time to report something.
UPDATE: a few minutes after I posted this story the Feedburner counter here updated for the first time in 48 hours. The Feedburner admin panel still shows old data. Seems like Feedburner is back up and updating incrementally.
UPDATE II: about an hour later the Feedburner site has been updated too. Everything seems to be back to normal. No official announcements yet.
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