Bloggers who use JournalSpace to host their websites have been offline for several hours today. Members are emailing me that they received no warning and still haven't heard from JournalSpace. Though the blogs themselves are down, comment areas that use Haloscan are still active and are being used to ask what happened—such as this thread at Cathy Seipp's site.

Saturday afternoon update: Still down, but with an explanation after the jump...

Sunday night update: Wow, JournalSpace is still inoperative. Refugees are showing up on other blogs voicing the fear that all may be lost.

This message now appears in place of JournalSpace blogs:

Early Friday morning, a hard drive in the main server that hosts the live Journalspace site experienced a hardware failure. We have worked around the clock to fix the problem, and restore our members' data from a recent backup. However, due to the nature of this failure, some of our backup was also corrupted. Some recent data as well as sporadic older data may be lost. We are still working to restore every bit of data we can. Please bear with us as we attempt to bring journalspace back to normal.

Please check this page for updates. We can't respond to inquiry emails at the moment, as our only priority is getting journalspace back online.

Journalspace member 'westy' has set up an unofficial forum for journalspace members to get in touch with each other. We won't be able to participate in the forum, as our only priority is getting journalspace back online.

As of Sunday, the URLs just return an error message.