How Google flagged all search results as harmful? – Human Error

As posted earlier, Google flagged all search results as harmful. Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience for Google has posted an entry on Official Google Blog about the said incident and how it occurred. Here you go:

We periodically update that list and released one such update to 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. 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.

Google gets away with it. It happened on Saturday – stock markets are closed or this would have meant a decline in their stock. LOL – that’s just my theory. A lot of people I am sure were near fainting to see that Google was not working. Some law suite might show up actually! ;)

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