This may be more information that any of you want, but since some (okay, one) of you have (has) asked, here's the scoop.

Blogcritics.org is served up by Hosting Matters, as are a decent number of popular blogs like Instapundit. The actual computers HM uses are taken care of by a company called Net Access Corporation. Unfortunately, NAC had a little trouble yesterday when something caught fire.

No, I'm not kidding. The official NAC announcement gives a hint, but the Hosting Matters thread spills the whole beans.

It was all out of our hands, out of the hands of Hosting Matters, and frankly out of the hands of NAC as well. Call it an "act of God," though I suspect that Glenn Reynolds got a traffic spike that caught his server on fire. Not really.

Yes, theoretically there are things that could have been done by either HM or NAC to provide a faster recovery. As it was, the outage lasted almost ten hours. However, those things are generally expensive, and those costs always get passed along somehow, so it could have been worse. We've chosen to be very grateful that the server came back online without any data loss.

Again, a one-time occurance like this doesn't seem to be worth blaming on anybody. I'm sure that HM is looking into things they can do to reduce their vulnerability, as is NAC. We'll sit tight and be happy for now, hoping nothing like this happens again.