What Happened to Google?

If you browsed online Saturday morning, you more than likely saw it with your own eyes. Google was down and had all the world a buzz for the brief 50 minutes of confusion. Turns out, it was a human error that caused Google to report any and all searches as “harmful for your computer” and therefore incapacitating Google.

Google was quick to research and fix the issue and then explained to the world it was a mistype in programming language which in essence turned every single website that Google indexes as a “malware warning website” and therefore not allowing users to go to their intended website.

“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,” said Google. “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 work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list. 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.”

Fifty or so minutes later, Google was back to normal and the entire world seemed to breathe again.