Monday, February 02, 2009

HUMAN ERROR BRINGS GOOGLE TO A GRINDING HALT

Washington, February 1, 2009
The Economic Times

Search engine Google came to a grinding halt when a "human error" temporarily prevented millions of people from finding web pages on the Internet.

Google incorrectly labelled all other websites as potentially harmful and stopped Internet users from directly clicking through to their search results as a message flashed: "Warning! This site may harm your computer."

The problem arose at around 2.30 pm GMT yesterday and was only fixed after almost 40 minutes by which time millions of users had been affected.

The company later announced that the fault had been caused by "human error" during updation of harmful sites, when a single forward slash (/) was put on the list in place of a full web address, effectively blacklisting every website as all addresses contain the character, the media reported.

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