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Google's Blogger brands users as spammers

False positives lock blogs

By John Oates • Get more from this author

Posted in Applications, 4th August 2008 15:03 GMT

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Google-owned Blogger has apologised for wrongly locking user accounts for being suspected spammers.

The mistake, caused by a bug in data processing code, was uncovered on Friday and by Saturday the company said it had restored access to all accounts wrongly identified as spammers. The bug mistakenly identified blogs as spammers even when company algorithms reckoned they weren't. As a result bloggers were unable to access or edit their blogs until the system was fixed.

Blogger.com emailed an apology to users on Saturday when access was restored.

The company said it was looking at extra monitoring and process checks to stop the mistake happening again.

One irate blogger said: "Google lost my trust yesterday. They’ll have to work twice as hard to regain it due to their lack of acknowledgment of the problem."

Figures from Alexa.com found Blogger suffered more downtime in 2007 than any other Top 20 website.

Blogger's own blog on the outage is here. ®

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