I thought it might be something that I did. My Google Reader page has been really strange for the last day or so. I would mark an article read, and it would come back as unread. I would mark all articles in a folder read, and a couple of dozen of them would be marked as unread. I’d refresh the page, and either get a page with no unread articles — or 100. I would mark all articles read two or three times before it would “take” and then the next I refreshed the page those 100 articles would be back unread.

This morning, I learned that I’m not the only one experiencing this problem. Apparently, the Google “support” (or what passes for support at Google) forum has lit up with complaints about this issue.

I’m beginning to think last week’s Gmail glitch might be related. This is symptomatic of a code base that has grown fragile through uncontrolled growth and lack of any consistent regression testing. I thought Google was better than that, but maybe not…