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If you were using Google this past Saturday between 6:27 a.m. and 7:25 a.m. PST, chances are that you have been warned by the search engine that your search result "may harm your computer". Trying another request couldn't help and you soon realized that the whole Internet might have harmed your computer. If that's no news for some of us, this might be a different story for Internet novices who think that Google is the Internet.

Google's malware detector works via a partnership with the non-profit organization StopBadware.org, who aid Google by supplying them with a list of sites known to install malware. Google updates these lists regularly, but sadly, the URL "/" got accidentally added to the list, effectively blacklisting every site on the Internet.

"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."