Google suffers a brief bout of paranoia

Google suffers a 'minor' bug

As far as some of the more digitally inclined amongst us are concerned – i.e. those that see the world as a string of zeros and ones – the world ended (albeit temporarily) on Saturday as Google stopped working properly.  Technically it still worked, search results were delivered, it’s just that those results were all (yes, ALL) flagged as potentially dangerous.

That’s right – on Saturday Google reported that every site in existence could be potentially harmful.  Perhaps more interesting than the blip itself was the Internet’s reaction to it.  It’s probably not advisable to rely heavily on Google’s ability to detect ‘nasty’ sites but if the reactions from much of the Internet were anything to go by panic broke out and we were suddenly blind and alone in the world – as a look at our current online social barometer would shows: Twitter was overrun with comments.

After Google naughtily laid the initial blame at the door of StopBadware.org, a not for profit third party watchdog, it turns out that the problem was really just human error.  Someone accidently checked in a forward slash as a value to a file to be avoided and, as you probably know, the forward slash is used in all URLs.

Forty minutes later and the rest, as they say, was history…

Image courtesy of mitjamavsar.