A bug in Google's system

I got this e-mail today from Google:

Hello,

There was a bug in our system that allowed you to sign up for a nickname that was already taken. Please log in at and update your profile with a new nickname. We are very sorry for any inconvenience this may cause, and hope that you'll take this chance to come up with a new creative nickname!

Thanks for your understanding and best of luck in the contest.

- Google Code Jam Team

This is after more than a month using the old nickname and doing some of the exercises with it. My nickname is ideed very common, Rick, but it's not the same as the one with Google's profile, even though the e-mail address is the same.

So the only thing I can think of is that they were not checking for unique nicknames before and were relying their system solely on some internal code. Now that the contest start date is approaching, they figured unique nicknames will be important.