As noted by Tim at An Englishman's Castle, numerous blogs seem to got themselves stuck in a timewarp dataed approx Dec9/10. Fortunately I subscribe to the Register and therefore am informed that Typepad.com is now Titsup.com (actually given the parent company is called Six Apart, perhaps it should be renamed Fall Apart instead?) in a bad way. It's amazing how many blogs appear to use Typepad even ones such as the Marmot whose address doesn't contain the T domain, but it seems like blogs.com is also a Typepad/Six Apart powered set of blogs. FallApart.com do finally (it's taken a while) have an explanation at their home page:
During routine maintenance of our network and storage systems last night, we experienced an issue with our 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. Verifying data can be a slow process and will take time.
In the meantime we are currently deploying backup copies of your weblogs from approximately 2 days ago. This is what will be displayed for your blog. The TypePad application is currently unavailable, which means that users will not be able to log in, and visitors to weblogs will not be able to post comments. We are working to bring TypePad back online as soon as possible.
The disadvantage of having your own blog tools is that sometimes they cock up slightly and give misleading results. On the other had though you aren't tied to anyone else. Indeed since my blog tools require nothing more than a basic web server (no MySQL or PHP thank you very much) and FTP access thereunto its hard for things to kill my blog.