Google Breaks for 40 Minutes
Abul Taher
The Times Online
The world’s biggest internet search engine shut down today for almost an hour, leaving hundreds of millions of surfers stranded in cyberspace.
Google broke down for forty minutes this afternoon, paralysing everything from internet-dating to people checking out the latest news.
Anyone searching for a site using Google was blocked with the warning: “This site may harm your computer.” The problem started at 3.30pm.
As fear spread across the internet that hackers would bring the mighty search engine down and cause millions of pounds in damage, it emerged that the entire search engine was crashed by a rogue “/”.
Marissa Mayer, the vice-president of Google, explained the search engine has a list of harmful websites that it warns users not to visit. This afternoon a Google employee, whose job is to input the websites into the company’s system, accidentally typed “/” for the whole URL of a bad website. This caused Google to flag up every site with “/” in its URL as harmful, and blocked access.
“Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file,” said Mayer.
Within minutes of the problem occuring, the internet blogosphere, from California to New Zealand, went into a frenzy of panic and speculation about what caused the problem.
The new social newtworking site Twitter was also jammed with news feeds and screen-shots of Google pages under the heading “Googmayhem” or “Googmayharm”.
Some blogs said that Google had been infected with a malicious virus by hackers, while others said the glitch was caused by a mighty failure in Google’s infrastructure.
One blogger said the glitch showed the dangers of having most people in the world relying on the Google “monoculture” for internet searches.
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