Google Blocks The Internet

Google flagged all search results with the message “This site may harm your computer".This happened on Saturday 31st January.

If you had problems surfing it was Google and not your Computer.

On Saturday the 31st January you may have had problems going to any web page via a Google search. This was because of human error on the part of Google and not a fault with your computer or protection software such as anti-virus or firewall.

Here's what Google said:

• If the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously we flag the search as malicious. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods.
• We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site Saturday morning [USA Time]. 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.
  
• The duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

Internet & Web