HDD suddenly has a lot of badblocks

Alir

For the past 1 1/2 weeks, my external 1TB HDD has been running constantly performing various stress tests via "dd" and "badblocks". It completed a few previous badblocks tests without returning any errors.

 

I just checked my laptop after numerous hours and was surprised to find that the badblocks test is currently at "0/0/32710602 errors".

 

What gives? From the best of my knowledge there has been no physical damage whatsoever. Could this be as a result of a software bug? If not, I assume the HDD is beyond salvation now?