Google blacklists entire internet

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 2 Feb 2009 at 08:20

Google has apologised for a "human error" which caused the search engine to report every site as potentially harmful to your computer.

The problems first appeared on Sunday afternoon, with Twitter exploding in a frenzy of posts proclaiming the death of Google.

"Google's broken! It's showing "This site may damage your computer" for everything... whoops... Google, please don't die," notes a typical post.

Google swiftly issued an apology for the problem explaining the panic had been caused by a single misplaced character.

"What happened? Very simply, human error," the company says on its blog. "Google flags search results ... that are known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously.

"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."