On Saturday morning last week Google was banning all the websites in the search results listings as a result of a human error as explained by the company, reports the Register. Every site was flagged with the warning: “This site may harm your computer”, identifying thus each searching result as a malicious destination that represented a threat to end users. If a user attempted to visit any search link they faced Google's standard malware warning that blocks reaching the intended destination.
The system glitch lasted for about an hour. Later the company posted a notification on their Internet blog where they explained the glitch as a result of human error. Someone in Mountain View seems to have mistakenly designated a "/" as a site that was surreptitiously trying to install malware on visitors' machines. Thus Google's malware warning system was addressing every site as a potential harm to users’ computers.
"Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file," Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of search products and user experience, wrote. "Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes."
Today, on Monday February 2, the system again displayed an error when our author tried to access some informational website. The same message ran: “The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds”. At the moment everything works well.
Update: Today some users of Google's e-mail service - gmail have reported that they have got 500 error while loading their e-mail mailboxes.
The Register
