I just tried unsuccessfully to subscribe to a feed hosted by the annoying bozos at FeedBurner. From my Temboz feed error counters, it seems FB feeds have been failing with 503 errors for at least the last 5 hours or so, par for the course.

Just another reason why outsourcing vital services to the cloud is not always a good strategy.

gondwana ~>GET -eUS http://feeds.feedburner.com/Fooducate
GET http://feeds.feedburner.com/Fooducate
User-Agent: lwp-request/1.39

GET http://feeds.feedburner.com/Fooducate --> 503 Service Unavailable
Connection: close
Server: NS_6.1
Content-Length: 62
Client-Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:31:18 GMT
Client-Peer: 66.150.96.119:80

<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>An Error Occurred</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>An Error Occurred</h1>
503 Service Unavailable
</BODY>
</HTML>

Update (2009-04-30):

It is possible the problem lies with my ISP (although I could replicate it at work as well). I can ping FB from my Joyent accelerator but not from home where my Temboz instance runs.

A work-around is to use the newer Google server feeds2.feedburner.com instead. For Temboz, all you need to do is run sqlite3 rss.db and the command:

update fm_feeds
set feed_xml=replace(feed_xml, 'feeds.feedburner.com', 'feeds2.feedburner.com')
where feed_xml like 'http://feeds.feedburner%';