Thanks to whoisgregg who pointed out in the webmaster group that my comments were utterly horked. Trying to view a thread gave the error message

WordPress database error: [Can’t open file: ‘wp_comments.MYI’ (errno: 144)]
SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = ‘538′ AND comment_approved = ‘1′ ORDER BY comment_date

Luckily, doing the Google search [Can’t open file: ‘wp_comments.MYI’ (errno: 144)] found this link at #1, and it gives the answer. From a MySQL prompt, type the following command:
repair table wp_comments;
and in 1.83 seconds, things are fine again:

mysql> repair table wp_comments;
+------------------------+--------+----------+----------+
| Table | Op | Msg_type | Msg_text |
+------------------------+--------+----------+----------+
| xxxxxxxxxx.wp_comments | repair | status | OK |
+------------------------+--------+----------+----------+
1 row in set (1.83 sec)

I have no idea why this happened out of nowhere. I don’t think adding the FeedBurner plugin had anything to do with it; I suspect the same holiday bad mojo that has been running amuck finally got around to hitting my blog. Seriously, it seems to be everywhere. I tried to visit a page just a few minutes ago on ubuntuforums.org, only to see

And then last week I tried to buy something on eBay. Once I tried to pay, I got this error message repeatedly:

It took me hours to be able to buy my item, and in the meantime eBay kept emailing me saying “Hey, you bought this item–don’t forget to pay for it!”
People notice it more when Google has an issue, but I’ve been seeing issues with a lot of sites over the last couple weeks. I meant to take last week as a vacation, but it didn’t really work out, so I may try to take 3-4 days off later this month instead. I for one will be glad to see the holidays over, because it means that web sites will be fully staffed to handle any new issues.


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