Yesterday was a Black Tuesday for Newsgator users as the service suffered a major breakdown and was unavailable for most times of the day.

The Newsgator website mentioned that NewsGator Online is currently down for maintenance which was certainly not the case. How can you bring down the service without even notifying your customers in advance.

The facts are out now. Greg Reinacker has written a detailed account of what actually happened and why they had to shut down the service. It was some errant query that screwed up their SQL server.

Though I was initially very frustrated when Newsgator went down, it is nice to see the RSS company admitting to the problem and explaining it in detail. Atleast, now we now what happened.