When you are one of the largest international technology companies in the world, staffed entirely by the Internet elite, and you own Blogger, the site that popularized Internet blogging to begin with, it probably doesn’t spark a lot of confidence when you accidentally delete your Blogger-run blog. Yet that’s what Google just incredibly did. From the men themselves:

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.

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.

Hey, Google? See that “Delete Blog” button at the top of your Blogger interface. Whatever you do, don’t press it!

Weirdly enough, this seems to be a common problem for Blogger-hosted blogs. We regularly read a couple of sites that are on Blogger and a surprising number of them have accidentally deleted their blogs at one time or another. Bubblegumfink, a fun blog about 70’s pop culture, has somehow managed to delete their blog not once, not twice but thrice!

The image above is a message from Trey Philips, who briefly took over googleblog.blogspot.com while it was deleted. Although Google’s since fixed the problem, maybe they ought to add a few more confirmation dialogues to the “Delete Blog?” interface while they’re at it.

Oops! Google accidentally deletes its blog [News.com]