Google blog taken over by student

Thousands of fans of the Google Blog awoke this morning to see the latest post on the site was one titled " Google, fix your blog pleeasssee!"

28 March 2006 9:58 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Thousands of fans of the Google Blog awoke this morning to see the latest post on the site was one titled " Google, fix your blog pleeasssee!"

But rather than a disgruntled employee upset with the search engine it transpired that Google had accidentally deleted the account and allowed a student from Texas to take over the url.

"P.s Just to clear things up, I'm not associated with Google" the student said. "I just wanted to take advantage of this before someone else with less worthy intentions did. The username was giving a 404, so I tried registering a new blog with it. Surprisingly, it worked."

Google said on its site after the problem had been discovered "The blog was mistakenly deleted by us (d'oh!) which allowed the blog address to be temporarily claimed by another user".

According to the now updated blog Google said that it originally worried it was a systemwide vulnerability for Blogger, but then realised the blunder it had made and reinstalled the original files.

Google seems keen to point out that "This was not a hack, and nobody guessed our password. Our bad".