“This site may harm your computer” – Google Error

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this
morning, you likely saw that the message “This site may harm your
computer” accompanied each and every search result.

According to Google, “This was clearly an
error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.”

How did this happen?

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.