In what Google officials are blaming on human error, for a while every site on the Internet was labled as malicious. For about an hour on Saturday morning, every search result had the warning “This site may hurt your computer.” Users who clicked anyway were brought to a page blocking access and advising them to choose another site. According to the official Google blog, the error occurred during a routine update of the list of malcious sites Google uses to block malicious sites. Unfortunately the human doing the upload made a simple typo: 

          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 quickly and reverted the file. 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.

While Google fixed the problem quickly and issued a swift apology, it still has many people upset. Having your site labeled as malicious by Google can be very damaging!