I've been chugging along blogging every day for nearly two months. Everything's fine and I check the blog this morning and all tags and categories are no longer associated with each entry. Everything was fine at midnight, then this morning I noticed Akismet had a new version available so I did the auto-update and that's when I noticed the empty grey bar where tags and categories are listed under each post. I have no idea if it's just coincidental. I tried to deactivate Akismet hoping that was the problem but the tags and categories are still missing. If I try to add them again THEY STILL DO NOT SHOW UP!

When I go to the tags section of the dashboard they're there, but when I go to the category section, there are NO categories listed. I hope someone knows what this is. Please help.

Blog address: http://www.sisterspetpics.com/blog

Sorry for taking up your bandwidth over here. I panicked. It appears the problem is my host. I don't understand it, of course, but first the tags and categories disappeared, the next thing I know the whole blog goes down. Why the tags and categories get dropped...then the site??? Oh well. I contact them. They tell me they know, they're working on the problem. I just refreshed and all seems to be well...for the moment.

I too had this happen over the weekend and also suspect my hosting company. Can anyone explain why this happens?

What is interesting is when I try to recreate the categories, WP says they already exist. I also cannot add posts or update text widgets (and many other things I suppose). Any insight I can take to my hosting company to resolve this quickly would be appreciated.

Thank you,
Will

I can think of any number of reasons this could have happened. Your host might have been doing an upgrade/maintenance/moving your site to a new server, had a problem with the server.

If you were in the process of viewing the site at that time, the database might have been off line. If it was scheduled maintenance, you should have gotten a email from them (at least my host sends me emails when they schedule maintenance)