At 8:38 a.m. EST yesterday, December 3, the Technorati website all of a sudden started refusing access to all visitors, responding with an HTTP 403 error (access denied). The problem was not resolved until 9:44 a.m.
During this period, the website did occasionally come back, but the problems started again almost immediately. In total, the Technorati website was unavailable for 55 minutes.
Presumably someone at Technorati was making modifications on the backend and mistakenly triggered this. We can imagine that there was some frantic activity over at the Technorati offices while this lasted.
Technorati is one of the 500 most popular sites in the world according to Alexa.