Google's app engine has been doing a bit of a Katy Perry today, blowing hot n' cold, in and then out, up and then down.

At 6:30 a,m, Pacific time, the engine began to splutter a bit with high latency levels and error rates. It then went into "unplanned maintenance mode" before copping out into read-only mode, leaving developers helpless to update their apps.

In a statement, Google admitted it was having issues, noting "All applications accessing the Datastore are affected," and adding "Our engineering teams are looking into the root cause of the problem."

Not content with looking like a bunch of twits anyway, Google's App Engine team announced it would be keeping developers up to date via twitter, just in case people had nothing better to do than sit around and wait for Google to get its act together. At around 3:15 Eastern time, Google announced its "Datastore read access has been reenabled and the team expects Datastore write access will be reenabled shortly."
Great.

Just in time for the bank holiday weekend then. Sigh.