Google's try to clean up Blogger backfires

Google's Blogger site is riddled with malware and spammers, a fact that StopBadware.org attributes to Google's No. 5 ranking on its list of most infected network sites on the Internet (the other 4 sites that round out the top 5 are all in China). But Google's remedy may have been worse for users than the spam.

In an attempt to clean up the site, Google mistakenly flagged a number of legitimate Blogger sites as spam and locked them, according to a report in Network World. The result was a long list of complaints to the Blogger Help Group, and numerous threads on the issue.

Google says a bug in its data processing code caused the problem, and in its Blogger Buzz blog, promised to add "monitoring and process checks to ensure that bugs of this magnitude are caught before they can affect your data."

But the incident is a black eye for cloud computing. By locking out legitimate bloggers, even though they use the service for free, it underscores the lack of redress that users of cloud computing have. What happens when the applications are mission-critical? Enterprises will need to have that answer spelled out, preferably contractually, before cloud computing can be seriously considered as a viable enterprise option.