Internet chaos as Google goes gaga

Google was brought to a worldwide standstill for an hour yesterday after an employee mistakenly blocked any access to web pages through its site.

Millions of online surfers entering any item into Google from 2.30pm yesterday were met with a message saying ‘Warning – visiting this website may harm your computer!’

Even the BBC and the Harry Potter sites were listed as ‘suspicious’.

Google – the most popular search engine, used by 63 per cent of the world’s internet users – said the glitch, which lasted for 55 minutes, was down to simple human error.

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice-president of its search products

Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file.

‘We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in to prevent it from happening again.’

Police said Google, which recorded 7.6 billion search queries in just one month last August, did not suspect any involvement by hackers.

Yesterday marked the deadline for filing tax returns online.

With an estimated five million returns still outstanding in the UK, the glitch posed a potentially serious threat for thousands using Google to access the HM Revenue & Customs website.

Smaller search engines, such as alltheweb.com, Yahoo! and live.com, functioned normally.

dailymai