Technofriends

During the late India hours yesterday or early morning US time, Google started showing some glitches when for every search, the Google search engine started giving “This site may harm your computer” warnings for any and every site, google included. Reports about this bug started flooding the internet and the world of Twitter too. In the current age, when social media governs the impact and importance of news, a quick fix and explanation from Google was definitely expected.

As per Google, the bug got injected because of a human error while checking in the latest list of bad websites. This list as per Google is brought out in partnership with StopBadware.org.

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.

Interestingly, every Malware warning that Google shows in the search result, it also shows up a more information link to StopBadware website, this led to most of the Google users turning up to StopBadware website causing their servers to crawl on their knees and eventually dying causing a Denial of Service for users ( time to check out Akamai or other CDNs, you are famous now StopBadware).

This bug also affected Gmail, as their spam filtering also makes use of the same technology, the chances of your good mail landing in your spam folder are pretty high. So do make sure you have a look at your spam folder, if you are still waiting for that important email.

[Google via StopBadware]

[Image Source: TechPavan]

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