It was the weekend which shook Google to its very foundations… possibly. All around the world, users of the search engine which prides itself – and has built a multi-billion dollar business – on providing the best, most useful answers to every query were greeted with a message warning that “this site may harm your computer”.
The same text was pasted next to every search result – for everything from Aardvarks to Zoroastrianism. In effect, Google was warning users that the entire internet was sick and shouldn’t be touched with an electronic bargepole.
Panic spread as the global web community told each other about this apparent breakdown. Google eventually fixed the problem, explaining that an update of a list of malicious sites somehow ended up including every web address, instead of one specific URL. But what a textbook example of a corporate disaster allowed to rage out of control…
…hold on a minute. The entire incident lasted just 55 minutes. And if you were on the West Coast of the USA, where Google is based, you are unlikely to have been affected, because it started at 0630 your time on a Saturday morning and was over by 0725. So why all the hoo-hah?
Well, news spread like wildfire around the blogosphere – or more accurately the Twitterverse – as everyone seemed determined to pass on their panic, along with rumours that Google’s Gmail was also misfiring. So far. more people knew about the “may harm” incident than were affected by it. I got off a plane on my way home from a holiday on Saturday afternoon, asked online whether I’d missed any big tech stories, and was bombarded with messages about the Google crash.
