Blogger - what happened?

Okay, so for the dozens of you out there who do follow my blog on a fairly regular basis, I feel like I do owe you some explanation about what happened... as far as I can tell.

Randomly, out of the blue, Tuesday, August 4th about 2pm EDT I got this email from Google's Blogger team:

I freaked the F out.  I had JUST published a post, was it something in that post?  Was it an old post... maybe we posted a link to somewhere and that is now a malicious site?  (there had been situations in the past that we had linked to files that you couldn't get on the Play Store and we had takedown notices for those links)

I was just unsure - there was an option to file an appeal so I did that quickly.

But I started to reach out.  Any Google contact I had, checked the help forum, posted on Reddit and Imgur.  It's then that I learned that this wasn't just me.  Hundreds were posting - all saying they got the exact same notice, and all within a few minutes of 2pm.

It was starting to think that maybe this was some glitch, an overzealous filter causing a mass false positive.

It was scary because we had no communication from Google... to date, I don't see any issued statement from them, so no notion of how long this would take.  All the while, the site is down, and you have no access to any of your posts or site to take any fixes if needed.  (If there was a malicious aspect on my site, would I have been allowed to fix to reinstate?)

I've been writing this blog for well over 15 years (well, technically *this* site since 2013) and to lose all of that in a puff of Gmail smoke.  There was talk of being able to use the Google Takeout option and export your posts, so that you could possibly then use that to import into a new platform.

Not until 10am the next morning did I get an email saying it was restored.  

No "oops sorry".  Just a matter of fact, that they reviewed the footage and the penalty was reversed.

I don't know how to feel.

On Reddit, there's some folks saying that not an hour after they got their reinstatement, they got removed again.

I don't know what's going on, and I'm thinking I may look at a new platform... we'll see.  I've grown so accustomed to all the Google integrations with Blogger.

Anyways, hope it's all in the past and never heard about again.