Google has confirmed that a software bug—not actual malware—was responsible for a wave of Blogger websites being incorrectly flagged for violating its “Malware and Similar Malicious Content” policy, causing hundreds of legitimate blogs to be locked or temporarily removed.
The incident began on August 4, when Blogger users started reporting that their sites had suddenly been locked with a warning stating they had violated Google’s community guidelines. Affected publishers lost access to their dashboards, preventing them from managing posts, themes, settings, or other parts of their blogs. Some users also received warnings that their blogs could be permanently deleted within three months unless they requested a review.
As reports spread across Google’s official Blogger Help Community, hundreds of publishers said their sites contained no malicious content. Product Experts on the forum described the event as an unusually large-scale false positive caused by Blogger’s automated detection systems rather than genuine malware infections.
Google has now acknowledged the problem, saying a bug incorrectly flagged some Blogger-hosted websites as malware for less than a day and that engineers are working to restore affected blogs as quickly as possible. The company has not disclosed exactly how many sites were impacted, but users have already begun reporting that their blogs are being reinstated after submitting review requests.
Despite the ongoing recovery, several publishers say their blogs were restored only to be locked again shortly afterward, suggesting the fix is still being rolled out. Others have successfully regained access and are using the opportunity to back up their content in case the issue reoccurs. Community discussions indicate the problem affected both custom-domain blogs and standard Blogspot sites, with no clear evidence that publishers’ content or templates caused the lockouts.
For bloggers who are still affected, the recommended action remains to submit a “Request Review” through the Blogger dashboard and wait for Google’s restoration process. Google has not yet provided a timeline for when every affected blog will be fully restored, but the company says it is actively resolving the bug.
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