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| PHOTO 1 | PHOTO 2 | PHOTO 3 | PHOTO 4 |
|---|---|---|---|
| The familiar orange Blogger logo. | A Blogger dashboard under ordinary, considerably less alarming circumstances. | A padlock became the perfect symbol for the sudden blog lockouts. | Behind every “website” is a person typing, editing and occasionally muttering at a laptop. |
Étranger Things vanished in Blogger’s malware false-positive wave. Here’s what happened, what I learned, and why backups matter.
Yesterday, My Blog Apparently Became Dangerous
For one very strange day, Étranger Things disappeared from the internet.
Not because I had stopped writing.
Not because I had forgotten to pay for the domain.
Not because the French authorities had finally discovered my repeated crimes against grammatical gender.
Google Blogger had removed the entire blog for supposedly violating its policy on malware and similar malicious content.
Malware.
This was surprising news.
Étranger Things contains stories about learning French, finding buses, misunderstanding cheeses, navigating bureaucracy and slowly becoming a little more Aixois. Its most dangerous content is probably an explanation of matière sèche or an overly enthusiastic discussion of canned pineapple.
Nevertheless, Blogger had spoken. The blog was locked, the site was unavailable, and I could not get into the dashboard to manage it.
One moment I had a blog.
The next moment I had a large digital padlock and the unsettling feeling that a years’ worth of words could be erased by a computer that had apparently mistaken a tartine for a Trojan horse.
It Was Not Just Étranger Things
Once the initial panic subsided enough for me to search for an explanation, it became clear that this was not an isolated problem.
Beginning on August 4, 2026, Blogger owners around the world reported that legitimate sites were being locked or removed for alleged violations of Google’s malware policy. Some had been publishing for more than a decade. Others used custom domains, as I do with etrangerthings.com.
According to BleepingComputer’s report on the Blogger lockouts, hundreds of publishers went to Google’s official support forum looking for help. More than 300 people had marked that they were experiencing the same problem, with over 100 replies appearing in one discussion.
The true total has not been published by Google. It may have been much larger than the number represented in the forum, but the publicly documented reports are in the hundreds rather than a confirmed count of thousands.
A Blogger Product Expert described the volume of simultaneous complaints as suggesting a misclassification by an automated system. False positives happen, but apparently not normally on this scale.
In other words, Blogger’s digital guard dog may have seen an enormous crowd of innocent blogs, barked “MALWARE!” and locked the gate.
What Is a False Positive?
A false positive happens when a security system identifies something harmless as dangerous.
It is a little like an airport scanner deciding that a croissant is an explosive device.
The scanner is doing an important job. Malware is real, and platforms such as Blogger must protect visitors from harmful downloads, deceptive scripts and compromised websites. Automated systems can examine enormous quantities of material much faster than human reviewers ever could.
But automation is not the same thing as infallibility.
When a system makes a mistake at this scale, it does not merely produce an incorrect label. It can remove years of writing, break links, frighten readers, interrupt advertising revenue and leave the person who created the site wondering whether the work will ever return.
PPC Land’s reporting on the incident noted that some affected dashboards warned owners that their blogs could be permanently deleted if they did not appeal within the stated period.
That is a fairly dramatic message to receive about a site whose recent subjects include French children’s songs and the correct vocabulary for tickling someone.
Asking Google to Look Again
The available option was to request a review.
That sounds calm and administrative when written here. At the time, it felt more like sliding a handwritten note beneath the door of a very large building:
Bonjour. I believe your robot has eaten my blog. Could someone please check? Merci.
I submitted the review and waited.
There was no detailed explanation of what Blogger believed it had found. There was no suspicious post identified, no troublesome link highlighted and no handy note saying, “It was the article about processed cheese.”
There was only the accusation, the locked blog and the appeal process.
Then, today, the email arrived.
To add one final flourish of technological comedy, an important email from Google had initially made its way into the Spam folder. After being moved back into the inbox, there it was: Blogger had re-evaluated the site against its Community Guidelines and reinstated it.
The Message I Had Been Waiting For
The Blogger email confirming that Étranger Things had been reviewed and reinstated.
The message was brief:
“Upon review, the blog has been reinstated.”
There was no description of what had triggered the removal and no grand apology from the algorithm.
But the important words were there.
Étranger Things was back online.
I immediately opened www.etrangerthings.com and watched the familiar homepage appear.
It is difficult to describe the relief of seeing one’s own collection of bus directions, language discoveries, travel stories and French misunderstandings return to the screen. It was only a website, but it was also a record of a life being rebuilt in another country.
The blog had not simply stored articles. It had stored the little moments when France began to make more sense.
The Uncomfortable Lesson About Digital Homes
I think of Étranger Things as my place on the internet.
But the incident reminded me that it is also a place built on someone else’s platform.
I own the domain name, but Blogger operates the system holding the posts. The site may feel like my little Provençal salon—with chairs pulled up for French learners, travelers, expats and local friends—but the building itself belongs to Google.
That does not mean Blogger is bad. It has made publishing accessible, affordable and remarkably easy. Without it, Étranger Things might never have grown beyond a notebook full of possible titles and jokes about tu and vous.
It does mean that a blog needs an emergency plan.
My expectation had been simple: write useful stories, follow the rules and the site would remain available.
What changed was my understanding of how fragile a digital home can be. A site does not have to be hacked, abandoned or intentionally deleted to disappear. Sometimes an automated system simply makes the wrong decision.
The small revelation was this:
Publishing is not the same thing as preserving.
What I Am Doing Differently Now
The first job after celebrating the blog’s return is making sure that a similar scare would not threaten the only copy of everything.
1. Backing up the blog content
Blogger provides an official process for downloading posts, pages and comments. Google’s instructions are available in its guide to backing up or importing a Blogger blog.
In Blogger, the basic route is:
- Open Settings
- Find Manage blog
- Select Back up content
- Download the backup
Google Takeout can also be used to download Blogger data.
2. Saving the theme separately
The words are only part of the site. The theme contains the layout and many of the customizations that make Étranger Things look like Étranger Things rather than a newly opened appliance instruction manual.
Blogger allows the theme to be downloaded from the Theme section.
3. Keeping copies of original photographs
Images deserve their own backup. A blog export and a photo archive are not necessarily the same thing, particularly when pictures have been edited, resized or stored through different Google services.
4. Watching every email folder
Apparently, “Check Spam” belongs beside “Remain calm” in the modern emergency handbook.
Messages about policy reviews, restoration and account security can be too important to miss merely because an email filter became overenthusiastic.
5. Keeping the domain information accessible
A custom domain provides continuity even when the publishing platform changes. Registrar login details, DNS records and renewal information should be stored somewhere safe and understandable.
Preferably somewhere more sophisticated than a sticky note labelled “internet things.”
A Little French for a Very Digital Crisis
This incident produced vocabulary I had not expected to need while writing a blog about life in Provence.
- un faux positif — a false positive
- un blog bloqué — a locked or blocked blog
- une panne — an outage or breakdown
- un logiciel malveillant — malware
- demander un réexamen — to request a review
- rétablir un site — to restore a website
- remettre en ligne — to put something back online
A1–A2
Mon blog est de nouveau en ligne.
My blog is back online.
B1–B2
Mon blog a été bloqué par erreur, mais Google l’a rétabli après un réexamen.
My blog was blocked by mistake, but Google restored it after a review.
Advanced
Il semble qu’un système automatisé ait signalé à tort de nombreux blogs comme malveillants.
It appears that an automated system wrongly flagged many blogs as malicious.
I may never need that final sentence in a boulangerie, but French learning has taught me never to underestimate the range of conversations one can accidentally have.
Back Between “Tu” and “Vous”
For roughly a day, Étranger Things was gone.
Now it is back—with its stories intact, its community welcome and its croissant crumbs exactly where I left them.
I am grateful that Blogger reviewed the decision quickly. I am also thinking of the other publishers who spent the same hours wondering whether years of work had vanished, particularly those whose sites may not yet have been restored.
The experience has made me more cautious, but not less enthusiastic.
There are still French words to misunderstand, buses to board in the wrong direction, Provençal traditions to discover and practical tips to share with the next person trying to build a life here.
The digital door is open again.
Bienvenue. Étranger Things est de nouveau en ligne.
Sources for Further Information
- BleepingComputer — Google Blogger locks hundreds of blogs in malware false positive
- PPC Land — Blogger owners face deletion clock as Google malware flags misfire
- Google Blogger Help — Back up or import your blog
- Blogger Community Guidelines
Your Turn
Was a blog, website or social-media account ever suddenly locked by an automated system? Share what happened, how it was resolved and the backup lesson learned the hard way.
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