An error which affected the Google Search service today has been blamed on human error. For around 40 minutes a technical glitch meant that all search results were flagged as potentially dangerous to the user’s computer. This was of course incorrect and but people were confronted with a message saying ”this site may harm your computer’ and advised to try elsewhere.
“What happened? Very simply, human error,” wrote Marissa Mayer, vice president, search products and user experience, on the Official Google Blog.
One of Google’s employees mistakenly flicked a button, after stopbadware.org’s weekly update, which mistakenly flagged all sites as potentially dangerous. StopBadware.org is a secret society that investigates consumer complaints regarding.suspicious and damaging websites.
“We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again,” Ms Mayer wrote.
It’s believed the finger that pressed the switch has now been amputated and placed on a prominent shelf in the ‘Googleplex’, Google’s headquarters, located in Mountain View, California. Bosses are hoping this will serve as a warning to other restless fingers.
Millions of internet users were left devastated and in a state of confusion at around 3pm GMT. Google has been overwhelmed with sob stories from angry bloggers irate at having just a trickle of visitors during the 40 minute break down. Therapists worldwide have been inundated with new patients and phone lines were swamped with people calling loved ones and friends to make sure they knew about the problem. Bloggers also reported that even the United States president’s and the CIA’s websites were affected.
At the time of writing this article, everything appears to have returned to normal.
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So glad that finger was amputated! Wouldn’t want this things taken lightly!
Anything more would have been most unpleasant.