Did Google alter the public record of its blogging service's massive 2-day crash?
Last Friday, I published a brief post to inform readers that Blogger, a blogging service owned by Google and used by many of the older Jewish blogs, had been down for more than a day. Blog owners were unable to post or access their blogs operating system.
And worse than that for many bloggers, recent posts they had made before the crash had disappeared as if they had never existed.
My post was meant to be a public service announcement, so any Blogger-powered blog readers who also read me would know why those blogs suddenly appeared dormant.
Shortly after I posted, a reader claiming to represent Google posted a comment criticizing me for making a disparaging remark about Google's management of Blogger.
Within that comment this person also posted a link to Blogger's status page.
So I followed the link.
Here is a screenshot of what I saw:
Note that there are no status updates at all on Thursday, May 12 – the day the crash began.
A few hours later, on Friday evening I went back to that Blogger status page to see if the crash had been fully resolved. But what I saw surprised me:
That's right. A post dated Thursday, May 12 had appeared out of thin air.
Did Google alter its status page by backdating that post?
Or was this simply a byproduct of Blogger's crash, a status update page that failed along with the rest of Blogger?
We may never know.
But Google has been accused of similar behavior in the past.
According to conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, Google's YouTube service marked several of her videos as private without her consent or knowledge, apparently in an attempt to censor those videos. When asked about this by a reporter who was visiting Google's corporate headquarters, a senior member of Google's legal staff stepped out of the interview to check on the allegation. She came back a few minutes later and assured the reporter – who had seen the videos marked private earlier that day – that the videos in question were and previously had been marked public. Google had made its censorship disappear.
Google's AdSense, the leading online advertising service which has a near monopoly on Web advertising, has long followed a policy of banning publishers from its program for alleged rules violations without documenting those alleged violations or allowing the banned publishers to contest the bans.
This doesn't mean Google played fast and loose with Blogger's status page during last week's near-epic crash. But it doesn't mean it didn't, either.