Google Crash
This is what happens when one entity gets too big for their britches.
An apparent system error left millions of visitors to the site puzzled when links to all search results were flagged with the warning ‘This site may harm your computer’. It is thought the site had erroneously identified all other websites – and some of its own pages – as containing malicious software or ‘malware’.
The glitch, which prevented internet users from directly clicking through to search results, was fixed within 30 minutes although users of Google’s email service Gmail have since reported finding genuine messages sent mistakenly to spam folders.
A Google spokesman said: “There was a fault. We don’t know the nature of it yet. Everything has been solved. We are still making initial enquiries.”
Google needs a new spokesman. That statement makes no sense. Something broke and they don’t know what was broken but they fixed it and are trying to find out what it was they fixed.
To think the Internet may be in their hands….
January 31st, 2009 at 9:55 pm
Typical PR hack. My best guess dealing with some similar type things myself: the developers rolled out a code change without proper testing, when it failed miserably, they rolled back to the “known good” code.
January 31st, 2009 at 10:52 pm
gotta be the funniest tech story of today!
January 31st, 2009 at 11:21 pm
Here’s an update:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7862840.stm
Human error. After updating the list of malware sites. And now they’ll “put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again”.