Six Apart’s hosted blogging service TypePad was down for one hour today. Typepad is one of the largest blogging platforms in the world, competing with the likes of Blogger.com and Wordpress.com.

According to our monitoring of Typepad.com (via our Pingdom uptime monitoring service), the website itself was unavailable for 59 minutes, starting at 07:37 a.m. CET. A short 3-minute outage followed 10 minutes later, but the website has been stable after that.

The Typepad.com website uses the same platform as the TypePad blogs, so it’s likely that all blogs were affected to some degree.

The Six Apart status page gave the following information, citing a failed router as the cause:

Update at 12:08AM PDT: Blogs are now loading. We are continuing to monitor TypePad closely.

Midnight: A bad power supply in one of our core routers is preventing some TypePad blogs from displaying. We are onsite working to resolve the problem.

11:40PM: The TypePad application is back online, and we are working to restore blogs currently.

11:28 PM PDT: TypePad is currently down. We are working to restore service and blogs as soon as possible. Updates to follow.

Google’s App Engine suffered from increased data access latency and errors yesterday, including problems serving applications. According to TechCrunch, the problems lasted for approximately six hours.

From the App Engine status page:

On July 2nd, all applications experienced increased error rate and latency with read and write Datastore and memcache operations, as well as some serving errors. Datastore access and serving have been fully restored as of 12:25 PM PDT.

What happened yesterday exposed a couple of interesting weaknesses for App Engine.

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We have exciting news to share. As you may have noticed, we made some changes to the Pingdom website yesterday, and the main thing we added was a new account type that many of you are going to love: Pingdom Free.

Now, for the first time ever, you can use Pingdom for free. We’re not talking about a free trial, but a completely free account that you can use for as long as you like, no strings attached.

In other words, you are getting a professional uptime monitoring service for free. With the Pingdom service, you’ll be the first to know when your site goes down.

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If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that we love everything geeky, and we have often put together themed galleries that appeal to tech geeks like ourselves.

Here is a collection of some of the geekiest galleries that have come and gone on this blog.

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Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.

Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much Wordpress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!

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Operating systems on supercomputers used to be custom-made affairs, but this has changed. These days, Linux has become a popular choice for supercomputers. But how popular? You may be surprised.

Top500.org maintains a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. A new list was published yesterday (it happens twice a year), so we took the opportunity to go through the list and find out what OS the top 20 supercomputers are using.

It took some work, but the results are interesting.

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