Saturday, January 31st, 2009
by Griff

(this is a re-post from http://www.lockergnome.com/griffin/2009/01/31/just-one-is-enough-to-break-google/)

How Google Broke the Internet

This morning everyone noticed that for a good 44 minutes, every single site listed in Google was listed as containing malware. Sites like Twitter literally exploded with people asking what the heck was going on. Even Google.com was being listed as being completely unsafe.

So what caused all of this confusion that broke the most popular search engine on the internet? Was it a virus attack? Had malware managed to infect Google’s servers, putting everyone who uses their services at risk? Nope.

Turns out Google uses a list compiled by third-party non profit groups that collect info like this. This list gets either automatically or manually added (whatever they feel like doing that day I guess). One of the good-old-boys at Google managed to screw up big time with this list.

One of the sites that was added to the list was “/”. That’s it. If you haven’t noticed every single Web site on the internet has a “/” in the domain name. So every site was listed as containing malware.

Google thinks it was quick to respond to it, but in internet time, 45 minutes is NOT a quick turn around.