Google has revealed that the problem which caused every site on the internet to be labelled as unsafe was down to human error.
For around 40 minutes (Google’s calculations) on Saturday afternoon (GMT), or for more than 90 minutes (various users’ calculations), every search result offered by Google came up with a warning that “This site may harm your computer”.
This warning – that was displayed on all sites, even the UK’s government homepage, Wikipedia and Google itself – came up on all browsers and each local version of Google. The glitch affected Google’s organic results but the sponsored links still went directly to their landing pages. It appeared to the user as though all the sites contained some sort of malware that would install itself on your computer, but Google has come out and said that it was merely human error.
Google’s Marissa Mayer wrote on the official Google blog: “What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message ‘This site may harm your computer’ if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods.
“We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs.”
While all sites temporarily came with a warning that may have diverted traffic away from them, stopbadware.org was inundated with visitors trying to find out what was wrong with their favourite sites that caused the security site to crash.
February 2, 2009
brands, search