A week ago, thousands of small blogs went offline in India. It appears that Google lost control over its blogspot.in domain, which is where many small blogs are available at. While you would think that a multi-billion dollar company like Google could fix a glaring issue like this within a short amount of time, blogspot.in remains unreachable to this day.
The blogs are not completely lost and remain accessible when you manually change blogspot.in to blogspot.com in their URLs, as The Next Web reports. However, there is no automatic redirect, so if blog posts are hard-linked on social media or other websites, unsuspecting web surfers would think that the content is not available anymore. The same is true for search results: Look for "site:blogspot.in" on Google, and you'll find millions of indexed results.
TNW's WHOIS query.
To check what's up, The Next Web ran a domain owner lookup query through WHOIS, and sure enough, the site currently doesn't appear to be owned by Google, but by a website called www.domainming.com. Bleeping Computer looked into that, and it seems this company is selling blogspot.in for ,999. This is a dangerous situation, as anyone can buy blogspot.in and redirect indexed searches and permalinks to distribute malware or scams.
Blogspot.in for sale, as seen on sedo.com.
Whatever happened at Google that led to this situation, it seems to be a bigger problem than you should think. The slow response could also be a bad sign for Blogspot and Blogger going forward. The company would likely pour tons of resources in rescuing the Indian domain if the service was important to them — $5,999 shouldn't stop a multi-billion dollar business with contacts to regulators and governments.