Google Apologizes For Marking Users As Spam

Posted on August 4, 2008

Google's Blogger.com service suffered an unfortunate error over the weekend that marked some legitimate Blogger account as spam. These users marked as spammers were unable to use their accounts reports The Register.

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.

There is an apology Blogger users posted here on Blogger Buzz titled "You Are Not Spam."

We want to offer our sincerest apologies to affected bloggers and their readers. We've tracked down the problem to a bug in our data processing code that locked blogs even when our algorithms concluded they were not spam. We are adding additional monitoring and process checks to ensure that bugs of this magnitude are caught before they can affect your data.

Google's Blogspot isn't the first social service to have its spam fighting efforts bring down legitimate users and it won't be the last. Twitter has also recently been suffering from a similar problem as it tries to curb spam.