What’s happened to Google? Hacked?? [UPDATED]

This morning I noticed every Google search result was marked as “This site may harm your computer”

All results linked to a google warning page. I was not the only one to encounter the issue. Christian Cantrell saw it about the same time I did…

By the time I finished writing this post, the issue was cleared up … weird!

UPDATE:

You just gotta love a large company that behaves so honestly – Google messed up, and they copped to it:

We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

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.

~ by anthonyfranco on February 1, 2009.