Official Google Blog: And we’re back:

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.

A week ago, I would have been joining all the folks who find this very funny. How can you delete your own blog and not notice? Now I know exactly where the Google folks were coming from.

Yesterday I was cleaning up my Dreamhost account, getting rid of all the C3 stuff now that the domain is fully moved to Pair Networks. We have 11 parked domains many of which begin with “cancer”, and I was clicking through to delete each one. There’s one domain on my account, canceractionnow.org which is not C3-related. It’s a client site for the Marti Nelson
Cancer Foundation. Without thinking, I saw “cancer” and hit “delete.”

I’m sure you know what that feels like…a split second after you clicked the button, you realize that you’ve made a terrible mistake and if this was a movie everything would be in slow motion as you race to the “cancel” button while screaming “NOOOoooooo….!!!!!!” It’s not Dreamhost’s fault…they do have a screen that says “Whoa…are you sure? You’re going to delete EVERYTHING if you do this” and I barely gave it a thought before clicking the “Yes” button.

Good news: It’s a static, simple site. Just some pages and email accounts. Dreamhost didn’t delete the user account so the files were all there. I just had to repoint the domain to them. I lost all the email addresses, but there weren’t that many and they’re all forwards. No one had email stored on the server. Heart pounding moment from a very stupid mistake, but it could have been a lot worse.