Saturday, January 31, 2009

google earth-sized glitch


Like millions of others, I was in the midst of a google search this morning when the site I found couldn't be accessed because "this site might harm your computer." Really? It was a site I'd been to without problem before. But maybe it had been recently hacked. Oh, well. I clicked on the next site the search had turned up. Same thing. Then I noticed: every site in my search list was flagged with the same warning. Was it possible that so many sites were now bad? I typed the URL of a site I knew was clean: my own. Again, got the alert. Google even warned me about accessing google.com. Had my computer become infected with some sort of worm? I thought Apples (ironically) didn't get worms. But something was terribly wrong. Even if I chose to disregard the warning, the site wouldn't load.

A few hours later, Google apologized on its website and chalked up the mistake to human error. But I wonder. In the 40 minutes Google search was down, millions typed Yahoo.com for the very first time. Only days ago, Yahoo's new CEO Carol Bartz promised shareholders to jump start the company in unconventional ways. Hmm.


2 comments:

Jeanine Marie said...

I woke up Saturday morning and I had this urge to google something.

Every site was listed as harmful so I went back to bed.

Ad Broad, oldest working writer in advertising said...

A very wise move on your part, Catnip. While the rest of us were hyperventilating about vermin ;)