A major technical malfunction has thrown blogs on the TypePad service from Six Apart—all of them, apparently—back to their older backup versions. Bloggers can't log in nor can readers add comments. No word yet on how long the blogs will be down or whether anything has been lost for good. This affects tons of blogs, including those at LATimes.com.

* 1:30 pm update: Still down. Wow, this is a bad one. Six Apart is the people that make Movable Type, the software LA Observed uses. But the outage affects only blogs that are published on its TypePad service. Still, that is thousands including many in Los Angeles.

** Fixed: As of 3:27 pm Six Apart says nothing has been lost, but some blogs may take awhile to be fully restored.