If you do a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you probably saw this following message "This site may harm your computer" accompanied each and every search result. This was obviously an error, and Google were very sorry for the trouble caused to all their users.

What happened? Very merely, human error. Google flags search results with this message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is called to install malevolent software in the background or otherwise slyly. We do this to guard our users against visiting sites that could damage their systems. Google maintain a list of such sites through both physical and automated methods. Google work with a non-profit known as StopBadware.org to come up with criterion for maintaining this list, and to offer simple processes for webmasters to take their site from the list.

Google sporadically updates that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unluckily (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was incorrectly checked in as a value to the file and '/' enlarges to all URLs. Opportunely, their on-call site reliability team found the problem rapidly and reverted the file. As we push these updates in a reeled and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing in this particular duration i.e. 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing amid 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any meticulous user was roughly about 40 minutes.

Google thanked their team for their quick work in finding this and they also apologized to all their users due to the inconvenience caused to them this morning and also to their site owners whose pages where incorrectly labeled. Google said that they will carefully interrogate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to avert it from taking place again.

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