YOU'RE lucky (or still sleeping) if you didn't see that phrase popped out of yo
ur computer screen when you were doing a Google search.
Apparently, sometime between " 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning" a
bug in the Google search rendered all websites harmf
ul, heh.
But Google immediately sprang into action and fixed this problem caused by a "h
uman error."
What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search result s with the message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is known to i nstall malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their compute rs. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to get our list of URLs. S topBadware carefully researches each consumer complaint to decide fairly whethe r that URL belongs on the list. Since each case needs to be individually resear ched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms. We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to re lease on 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 qui ckly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and roll ing fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and beg an disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.Phew...
