Google Error! All sites now tagged with “This site may harm your computer”

I just searched something from our google custom search box and shocked to see that with each result there is an entry “This site may harm your computer.” I was shocked to see that. It often means your server is hacked and you’re serving malware with each page load. In panic I rebooted the server and do an antivirus scan, but nothing detected.

Then accidentally, just accidentally, i searched google for something and bingo!, all the pages are now have that shiny warning. Search for the term “google” also shows the same. See the screenshot below.

It seems to have affected all the websites, even google.com. In addition to that I’m getting 5o2 errors for many Google pages. it sure looks like a global outage.

google error

Update:
This issue is not yet resolved for me. but just found out that it’s happening only my firefox, with google toolbar installed. Also I’m logged into my google account. In IE when I tested everything seems allright.

Update 2:
More in TechCrunch. This is reported around the world. But the problem seems solved now. Let’s wait for an official google announcement to see what actually happened.

In the meanwhile Twitter is exploding with this! It’s now referred as #googmayharm .

Update 3

Well, Google officially announced that this was in fact a ‘human error’ and they are sorry for the mess. So this is what happened:

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. 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 work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.

We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. 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. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.

well, so much for a ‘/’!

Tagged as: error, Google