Oops! Google accidentally deletes its blog

Google has admitted that it accidentally deleted its own official blog on Monday night. "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," Jason Goldman, Blogger Product Manager, wrote in a posting on the Google Blog. Apparently, the Google Blog was unavailable for a short time on Monday.

Despite earlier concerns that the site was hacked, Google's mea culpa clears anyone of wrongdoing.

According to this blog, someone named Trey Philips noticed that the blog was unregistered during its period offline and registered it. The blog links to a screenshot of the blog with a note from Philips urging Google to fix its blog.

On his own blog Philips explains what happened: "Regarding Google's Official Blog, I didn't hack it. I did re-register the username when I noticed, due to a Blogger bug, it had been deleted. (It's not the first time I've done something big on Blogger.) I tried keeping it as Google-oriented as possible. Right before I got to another update, Google had regained control of it."