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<a href="http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/31/google-glitch-briefly-disrupts-worlds-search/?partner=rss&emc=rss" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: 'Arial Black'">Google Glitch Briefly Disrupts World's Searches</span>
<span style="font-style: italic">New York Times
Liz Robbins
January 31, 2009 02:53 PM</span></a>
<span style="font-family: 'Courier New'">Google has become part of so many people's lives on this planet, like a dependable appendage -- until suddenly it malfunctions.
Such was the case, at least temporarily, this morning from 9:30 a.m. Eastern time to about 10:25 a.m., when all searches returned results with the same warning message: "This site may harm your computer." The link then referred users to StopBadware.org, the company that works with Google to flag sites with potentially dangerous software. Even if people chose to click on the link, disregarding the warning, the site would not pull up.
Here’s the gist of Google’s explanation:
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 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. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.
Google promised to “carefully investigate this incident” and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again. </span>
<span style="font-style: italic">New York Times
Liz Robbins
January 31, 2009 02:53 PM</span></a>
<span style="font-family: 'Courier New'">Google has become part of so many people's lives on this planet, like a dependable appendage -- until suddenly it malfunctions.
Such was the case, at least temporarily, this morning from 9:30 a.m. Eastern time to about 10:25 a.m., when all searches returned results with the same warning message: "This site may harm your computer." The link then referred users to StopBadware.org, the company that works with Google to flag sites with potentially dangerous software. Even if people chose to click on the link, disregarding the warning, the site would not pull up.
Here’s the gist of Google’s explanation:
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 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. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.
Google promised to “carefully investigate this incident” and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again. </span>