We received several reports (thanks Thanos and Jim) of sites which use the Sitemeter visitor counter that were no longer loading as of last night for users with Internet Explorer 7.

It appears that during a development update of SiteMeter, their team did not take into account a known bug in this version of the browser which does not allow modification of a parent container using scripts in one of its childs (using either the innerHTML or appendChild method). This causes the browser to stop loading the site, returning an "Operation aborted" message.

SiteMeter has now resolved the issue and published a blog entry explaining what happened. Just as with advertisement providers and the republishing of RSS feeds, it's an interesting example of how dependent our sites have become on third party code and the potential impact.