If you fancied looking up a new recipe or checking out the sports results last Saturday afternoon, Google wasn’t going to make it easy. Thanks to “Human Error” the search engine classified all search results as being potentially harmful.
Users who clicked on their search result were advised to pick another one. Which then was also blocked.
The problem affected internet pages across the globe, and continued for around 40 minutes before engineers were able to fix it.
Google works with stopbadware.org to decide which sites are most likely to install malicious software on people’s computers. The list of malevolent sites is regularly updated by stopbadware.org and passed on to Google.
Google reported that an engineer tried to add one web address to the blacklist, but mistakenly added all websites.
“We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning. Unfortunately, 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,” Google said in its official blog.
The Guardian have reported that there has been an estimated a $2-3m (£1.4-2m) loss of advertising revenue as a result of the glitch.
Source: BBC News, The Guardian