google blacklists the entire internet as “harmful”
31 Jan
Some of you may have noticed this, like I did, while searching for something online. This is a very interesting case of how much the internet relies on Google.
On Saturday, 31st Jan, for about 40 minutes, all search results from Google were labelled as “This site may harm your computer”. I thought I was the only one experiencing it, but it felt odd that evey single site would be blacklisted, so I did a proxy check, same thing, then searched around for other people having the same issue. Turns out it was a global event. I even watched it on CNN later in the day.
Amusingly enough, a search for “google” returned the same error. Essentially Google blacklisted it’s own website!
Even if you chose to ignore the warning, all you’d get was an error message that looked like this:
What this meant is, every single website linked from the Google search page was inaccessible, including Google’s own site. Now, if Google serves millions of searches per minute, imagine how much of the internet traffic was actually lost.
I won’t bore you with the tech jargon, but see the following links for detailed info:
Google’s explanation / apology for the issue.
StopMalware.org (The guys that work with Google to filter bad sites)
Techcrunch has an almost step by step account.
I wonder what the cash loss figures were? [ Update ] The Guardian.co.uk puts it at $2-3M. That’s about 5 billion Uganda Shillings. In less than an hour.
Wow.
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Audio:
Jimmy Buffet – Margaritaville
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Offtopic:
Apart from lost advertising revenue – which one expert estimated at $2-3m (£1.4-2m) – the incident is embarrassing for the world’s most popular search engine, known for its reliability.
- The Guardian.co.uk
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same thing happened to me yesterday! a simple search on the blue gum tree returned the same warning on ALL the results!
following your links now.
hi.
Hey Jaz!
All that money lost? Wow, but I figure they will “replave” it ASAP.
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