Google deletes its own blog

A student from Texas left internet giant Google with egg on its face by taking control of the company's official blog when it went offline yesterday. 

The unnamed student tried registering a new blog with the Google-owned Blogger service using the same googleblog name after the search firm's usual page failed to load.

Yesterday the blog carried the message: 'Google, fix your blog pleeassse!'

"Just to clear things up, I'm not associated with Google. I just wanted to take advantage of this before someone else with less worthy intentions did," the site said.

"The username was giving a 404, so I tried registering a new blog with it. Surprisingly, it worked."

Google later admitted that it had accidentally deleted the blog and that there was no widespread hacking problem for Blogger.

"We quickly learned from our initial investigation that there was no system-wide vulnerability for Blogger," Google said.

"The blog was mistakenly deleted by us (doh!) which allowed the blog address to be temporarily claimed by another user. This was not a hack, and nobody guessed our password."

See also:

Google Finance flashes the cash

But financial information site fails to excite analysts  22 Mar 2006

Google News dumps partner after PR hoax

Unedited news service falls victim to online prank  21 Mar 2006

Google pays up to $90m to settle click fraud case

Advertisers can now challenge advertising clicks back to 2002  09 Mar 2006

Worms turn on Google to hunt for victims

Google 'hacking' so simple even a monkey could do it  15 Feb 2006

Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below:

 del.icio.us     Digg this     reddit!