The popular Bloglines RSS feed reader was knocked offline for several hours Thursday due to what its owner, IAC Search & Media, described as a technical glitch.

The Bloglines home page was inaccessible from about 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern Time. Those attempting to log in to their accounts were met with an error page that read: "Bloglines is down temporarily. We will be back shortly."

Shortly before the service went offline it was behaving erratically, re-delivering many old feed items.

No data was lost during the service outage, according to Bloglines spokesman Nicholas Graham. "The Bloglines system is recrawling the feeds now and posts are being published," he said via e-mail.

Losing access to the RSS reader can be disruptive for Web users, especially those who use it for work. Feed readers have become essential tools for millions of people, providing a hub for monitoring the publication of new articles online.

With a service like Bloglines, people receive notifications of new content posted at specific Web sites, such as The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. Feed readers also flag articles across the Web that contain keywords or terms specified by the user.