Google's Blogger blog publishing and Blogspot blog hosting services went offline earlier Wednesday. Among the organizations affected by this apparently widespread outage was Google itself, which hosts its official company blogs on Blogspot.

Blogger publishers have posted a rising volume of complaints on the official Blogger discussion forum since Monday, reporting problems editing, publishing, and accessing blogs.

However, things apparently took a turn for the worst on Wednesday morning U.S. Eastern Time, when Blogger and Blogspot apparently went totally offline.

Checks on Blogger.com and a variety of Blogspot-hosted blogs by IDG News Service staff in different parts of the U.S. and Europe returned server error messages, confirming reports from users in the Blogger discussion forum.

Blogger and Blogspot came back online at around 11 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time. The outage apparently lasted over one hour. However, many Blogger publishers have been reporting error messages when trying to perform a variety of operations at least since Monday.

Google didn't respond to a query on Tuesday about the complaints piling up in the discussion forum, nor did it reply to a request for comment on Wednesday morning about the service's outage.