A person identifying himself as Trey Phillips, a Texas-based university student, claimed responsibility for the incident, which he said lasted 36 minutes.
Google admitted that it had accidentally deleted its blog, which is hosted at the company’s own Blogger service. This freed up the BlogSpot sub-domain the company uses, for re-registration by anybody else.
D’oh! blogged Jason Goldman, Google’s Blogger product manager, after the company regained control of its site.
Phillips said he registered a new blog as googleblog.blogspot.com, and posted a message encouraging Google to retake control of the domain, to keep it out of the hands of somebody with malicious intent.
While the incident is largely being laughed off as relatively trivial by many observers, it’s probably a good thing that the person who took over the blog had no harmful intentions.
While a typical Google blog posting is on a cozy, fluffy topic, such as the office dog, the company regularly uses it as its primary communications channel, announcing potentially market-moving information such as acquisitions and lawsuits.
