Orangejack

This morning, for less than an hour, it seemed the entire Internet went bad.

Google works with a non-profit organization called StopBadware.org to help protect you from bad websites when you search. If a site makes ‘the list’, Google will add the message “This site may harm your computer” because it’s suspected to contain viruses or something malicious.

Today Google said everything was bad – including themselves!

Flickr image Google Gone Bad by orangejack

Google reported later how everyone ended up on the list:

Since each case needs to be individually researched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms. We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release 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.

Oops.