Google's "20.5" Hour Blogger Meltdown

Administrator — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:19:00 GMT

Millions of blog publishers using Google's Blogger.com service were unable to use the service mid-afternoon Thursday (including Google itself). Service has since been restored after 20.5 hours of issues.

According to Google, during scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night, the service experienced some "data corruption" that impacted its behavior. As the near 24-hour long meltdown continued, bloggers and readers were experiencing a variety of anomalies including "intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages" according to the official announcement post.

Google did indicate that a small subset of Blogger users (estimated at 0.16%) may have encountered additional problems specific to their accounts. Yesterday Google rolled back to a pre-maintenance state/version of Blogger - from Wednesday May 2011 - and is currently restoring posts which may have been temporarily removed around that time. WM will provide more information as the story develops.

It will be difficult to determine just how much Web user traffic may have been diverted as a result of the downtime and service disruption. It does serve as a good reminder of the importance of creating and storing backups remotely and of having the ability to those deploy those backups quickly.

Blogger.com Is Security Threat Claims Sophos

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:15:00 GMT

Web security firm Sophos has published research regarding cybercrime in the first half of 2008 - and it's a interesting read. According to the Sophos Security Threat Report, website infection rate is three times faster than 2007.

It is estimated that the total number of unique malware samples in existence now exceeds 11 million, with Sophos currently receiving approximately 20,000 new samples of suspicious software every single day - one every four seconds

And what is the number one host for malware on the Web? Blogger. Hackers both set up malicious blogs on the service, and inject dangerous web links and content into innocent blogs in the form of comments. Blogspot.com accounts for 2 percent of all of the world's malware hosted on the web.

Sophos experts note that with the continuing popularity of Web 2.0 social networking sites, including Facebook and LinkedIn, among business users, cybercriminals who have already gained access to user profiles, may begin to use these as corporate directories, noting new employees and launching spear-phishing attacks specifically aimed at stealing information from new and unsuspecting members of staff.

'Net Features : blogger.com

Google's "20.5" Hour Blogger Meltdown

Blogger.com Is Security Threat Claims Sophos