Mountain View, California — Search engine behemoth Google on Saturday triggered off an online chaos when an alarming human error that temporarily plagued its security system that displayed a warning message users worldwide: “this site may harm your computer” for about an hour on Google’s Website, the company said. As the initial problem was sorted out, it took a couple of hours to put aright who actually was responsible for the error — Google or a nonprofit known as StopBadware.org.
Since 6:30 AM PST until 7:25 AM PST, almost every search for any site from Google’s massive database was flagged with the message “This site may harm your computer.” As part of Google’s malware protection, and if a user attempted to click on a flagged site’s link, a subsequent page would pop out that referred users to StopBadware.org, causing that site to crash from the millions of visitors trying to access the site. Although a link could simply be cut and paste, Google’s warning was awfully annoying enough to keep some people from pushing their luck.
“What happened? Very simply, human error,” Goggle vice president for search products and user experience Marissa Mayer said on the company’s official blog.
Google released a regular updates to a list of malicious websites from StopBadware.org, which probes consumer complaints, and “unfortunately (this human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs,” Mayer wrote in an official Google blog post explaining the glitch. “Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file.”
“The mistake in Google’s initial statement, indicating that we provided them with badware data, is a common misconception,” StopBadware.org wrote in its own blog post by Maxim Weinstein, the leader of the team. “We appreciate their follow up efforts in clarifying the relationship on their blog and with the media. Despite today’s glitch, we continue to support Google’s effort to proactively warn users of badware sites, and our experience is that they are committed to doing so as accurately and as fairly as possible.”
The Mountain View, California-based company expressed “apologies to any of you who were inconvenienced this morning, and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labeled,” Mayer wrote. “We will carefully inquire into this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.”
Mayer’s original blog posting about the incident made it sound like StopBadware.org was responsible for the error. StopBadware.org is a nonprofit organization that Google and other IT companies and academic institutions use to warn Internet users about sites known to install malware on computers that visit those sites.
The outage, widely discussed on Internet blogs and forums; Twitter was flooded in the news, with thousands of people posting about their kindred experiences on Google search, although the incident did not affect Google’s news search service.
Google controls about 70 percent of Internet searches, a market share that has grown steadily in recent years.