This morning reports came streaming in that “Google was freaking out.” From a Slashdot thread:
“It looks like for the moment at least, all Google results are failing the malware checks and being listed with a warning ‘This site may harm your computer,’ including all pages from Google themselves. Users trying to visit pages at search results will only be able to proceed via manual manipulation of the search result link to remove the Google click-through (which is also broken). Until Google fixes this bug, it looks Google web search is useless.”
Other reports claimed that Gmail was also affected, from a mailing list I monitor:
Just fyi, the problem also affected any mail coming into Gmail, wrongly marking emails as spam and putting a big red warning flag on
them…..So check your spam folders.
Google’s Marissa Mayers, who I am sure did NOT have a pleasant Saturday morning, acknowledged the screw up:
If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message “This site may harm your computer” accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.
What happened? Very simply, human error.
A NY Times blog covers it here.
My favorite commentary out there on the boards?
Skynet – er, Google – has become self-aware and has deemed that the entire Internet is harmful to us power sour – I mean, humans, and is protecting us for some reason it has not divulged yet…
Gotta love them Internets.