A word on yesterday's website outage

As I'm sure many of you noticed, we had some pretty significant difficulties Tuesday with TheBlaze website. I got a number of complaints and emails asking if we had been hacked, or taken the day off, or what the situation was.

In this case, the answer was much simpler: We got struck by lightning.

Not directly, but one of the vital data centers we use from a third-party company (Microsoft) was affected by a lightning storm Tuesday in San Antonio, which caused a massive outage that lasted for most of the day. Services were slowly restored throughout the day, and eventually the website came back up and was accessible to most of you probably sometime late Tuesday afternoon.

However, we still were unable to utilize the separate server that we use to actually generate new content and stories, so basically the website appeared to be in a more or less static phase until we were able to complete a full reboot of that server Wednesday morning.

We are back and operational this morning, and apologize for the inconvenience that this event may have caused.