SearchEngineWatch reported yesterday that Google's BlogSpot blog at googleblog.blogspot.com had vanished. Later a blogger named Trey Philips managed to register the googleblog name and posted a brief message than began with "Google, fix your blog pleeasssee!" Trey Philips has more about how he grabbed the googleblog name on his lazykarma.com blog. He also has list of links to blogs and sites that are covering the story.
Google has since reclaimed the blog. A graphic of the Google blog before Google reclaimed it can be found here, here and here. Google also admits that they are the ones who accidentally deleted the blog.
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.
The good news is that Google says there is "no systemwide vulnerability for Blogger." Apparently, it was just a silly mistake that has Google red-faced today. We can all learn from this by remembering to keep a back up of our blogs. If Google can accidentally delete a blog then anyone can.
