Official Google Blog Deleted, Blogger Registers googleblog.blogspot.com

Back in April 2004, Google launched their blog at googleblog.blogspot.com. But somehow, in the past few hours, that blog has been completely deleted from the Blogger servers, and users are instead seeing a “Not Found. The requested URL was not found on this server. Please visit the Blogger homepage or the Blogger Knowledge Base for further assistance.”

When tempted with a vacant blogspot URL with a PR9, one blogger did what many are probably very envious of… register the googleblog.blogspot.com blog URL.

Now, those who have the official Google Blog on their RSS feeds, saw an entry pop up a few minutes ago with:

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.)

And, of course, the comments have been left open (although they appear to have been closed now). It doesn’t show up on the main googleblog.blogspot.com URL, but it can be accessed through this link.

It has to make you wonder how this blog could have possibly been deleted. It doesn’t appear to be a simple glitch in the system, since other blogs (including other official Google blogs) appear to be intact. So what could have been the reason behind it? Disgruntled employee who has access to the blog? Overzealous blog spam filter automatically deleting blogs? Someone who hacked the blog and removed it?

Whatever the reason, I am sure that the blog will be restored to its former glory shortly, and it sounds as though the blogger who registered it is more than happy to hand it over to the Google blog team. But an interesting turn of events nonetheless, and we will probably hear more about it from Google once it is restored.

Update: It took a couple of hours, but the Google Blog is back up and running with all the original entries, and the “Google, fix your blog pleeasssee” entry is now gone.

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.

It will be interesting to hear their follow up to the situation.

Update 2: Here is my screenshot (click image for full sized version) of the blog while it was controlled by the blogger:

Google has also followed up on their own blog entry stating that they mistakenly deleted their own blog and that it was not hacked nor was their password guessed by anyone.