Google Deletes Own Blog
3/28/2006 03:12:00 AM
Sometime before 9:29 PM (PST): Trey Phillips goes to the URL googleblog.blogspot.com and finds a 404 not found error instead of the Official Google Blog. Opportunist that he is, Trey guesses that the blog has been deleted and races to register the username and blogspot hosting.
9:29 PM (PST): Trey Phillips makes his first post to the Unofficial Official Google Blog at googleblog.blogspot.com, complete with a standard Blogger template.
[View screengrab of Trey's blog entry and the incomplete original post.]
[Link to Trey's post which is now a 404 not found.]
Between 9:29 and 11:15 PM (PST): Mass hysteria overwhelms the Google Bloggers. Trey Phillips has apparently hacked the Official Google Blog. Hysteria gets even more mass as it spreads to the blogsophere, audience to it all. Figuring out what happens, the brave Google Bloggers wield their power of eminent domain and wrest the Official Google Blog registration from Trey Phillip's hands just as he punches in another update to his unofficial version.
11:15 PM (PST): Official Google Blog comes back online (replete with all archives and original template), announcing that the Google Bloggers have rescued their blog and the rest of the world's bloggers have no evil forces to fear. Whew! Google is saved. Mid-celebration, the Google Bloggers quietly update their post to admit their blunder was little more than errant clicking on their Blogger interface.
***
Most notable about all of this is that Google was able to quickly repair the deletion with saved versions of its post archives and blog template. Impressive, but expected from the communication channel of a large operation. Surprising to me, however, is that Blogger blogs are available so quickly after their deletion. Many accounts that issue individual usernames and URL's hold deleted accounts for a short period of time before re-releasing the names. Not so with Blogger apparently.
Thinking about what happened tonight, it is both humble and daring of Google to use its rather unsophisticated blogging tool to write one of the tech industry's most important blogs. But then, it would be ludicrous if they used a beefed up installation of say, WordPress, wouldn't it?
9:29 PM (PST): Trey Phillips makes his first post to the Unofficial Official Google Blog at googleblog.blogspot.com, complete with a standard Blogger template.
Google, fix your blog pleeasssee! <3
(P.S. Just to clear things up, I'm not associated with Google at all. I just wanted to take advantage of this before someone else with less worthy intentions did. The username was giving a 404, so I tried registering a new blog with it. Surprisingly, it worked. Oh, and no posting URLs in the comments or else they'll be deleted.)
POSTED BY TREY: 9:29 PM (PST)
[View screengrab of Trey's blog entry and the incomplete original post.]
[Link to Trey's post which is now a 404 not found.]
Between 9:29 and 11:15 PM (PST): Mass hysteria overwhelms the Google Bloggers. Trey Phillips has apparently hacked the Official Google Blog. Hysteria gets even more mass as it spreads to the blogsophere, audience to it all. Figuring out what happens, the brave Google Bloggers wield their power of eminent domain and wrest the Official Google Blog registration from Trey Phillip's hands just as he punches in another update to his unofficial version.
11:15 PM (PST): Official Google Blog comes back online (replete with all archives and original template), announcing that the Google Bloggers have rescued their blog and the rest of the world's bloggers have no evil forces to fear. Whew! Google is saved. Mid-celebration, the Google Bloggers quietly update their post to admit their blunder was little more than errant clicking on their Blogger interface.
And we're back
The Google Blog was unavailable for a short time tonight. We quickly learned from our initial investigation that there was no systemwide vulnerability for Blogger. We'll let you know more about what did happen once we finish looking into it.
Update: We've determined the cause of tonight's outage. The blog was mistakenly deleted by us (d'oh!) which allowed the blog address to be temporarily claimed by another user. This was not a hack, and nobody guessed our password. Our bad.
***
Most notable about all of this is that Google was able to quickly repair the deletion with saved versions of its post archives and blog template. Impressive, but expected from the communication channel of a large operation. Surprising to me, however, is that Blogger blogs are available so quickly after their deletion. Many accounts that issue individual usernames and URL's hold deleted accounts for a short period of time before re-releasing the names. Not so with Blogger apparently.
Thinking about what happened tonight, it is both humble and daring of Google to use its rather unsophisticated blogging tool to write one of the tech industry's most important blogs. But then, it would be ludicrous if they used a beefed up installation of say, WordPress, wouldn't it?
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