Google Accidentally Broke The Internet
Writing on the Official Google Blog Marissa Mayer, vice president, search products and user experience, Google, addressed the issue.
"This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users," wrote Mayer. Google actively works to inform its users about Web sites with malicious intent. It appears that in this case an errant keystroke and a human error caused the problem to happen over the weekend.
"We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods," wrote Mayer. "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."
Part of the protection that Google offers dictates that the list be updated periodically. Over the weekend, it appears that a Googler included the URL of "/" to the malicious site list, which unfortunately expands to every Web site on the Internet.
"Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file," wrote Mayer. "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 a.m. and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was [about] 40 minutes."
Since the error was caught and fixed it appears that only malicious Web sites are being marked as such again. Still, Google and Mayer acknowledged their error and offered an apology for any confusion that occurred.
"And again, our apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labeled," wrote Mayer.
