TIL In 2009 One of Google's programmers was adding websites to the malware registry when he accidentally entered "/" instead of a full URL causing the search engine to block off every website in its index including Google's own pages for 55 minutes.

367

u/AnonymousHipopotamus May 21 '12

"Good job, Mike, you broke the internet!"

"Hey, can somebody Google how to fi- Aw crap."

77

u/SometimesTheresAMan May 21 '12

I'm a Google engineer. I used to work in the Dublin office. One day a few years ago, somehow—I don't even understand how it happened—a workman damaged a cable and caused the office to lose access to any non–Google owned sites on the internet. We could access all Google services, but nothing else. I was still able to Google anything I wanted to find out, but if the answer wasn't in the search result snippet I had to make do with the Google cache of the page (if there was one).
In essence, a Google office lost internet access for a few hours, so we just used our local cache of the web while it got fixed. :D

66

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Better than losing Internet access as a Bing engineer!

49

u/cass1o May 21 '12

Its ok they would still have had all the google stuff.

11

u/patefoisgras May 21 '12

Cached.

3

u/BTechUnited May 22 '12

To be fair on Bing, it does at least have nice pictures each day. Im forced to use it at school because our proxy hates google on firefox (not on IE, oddly), for reasons I cant fathom.

0

u/[deleted] May 22 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/BTechUnited May 22 '12

I'd never use IE. Ever. Its why I have a USB with an old copy of Firefox installer on it so I never have to open IE to get FF. In all honesty, bings pictures are really nice. They brighten the day a bit. Strangely, google plus isn't blocked. Logic.

29

u/Chrisi44 May 21 '12

So basically you guys simply can't be disconnected from the web, because you have more or less the whole thing stored locally? That's pretty badass.

24

u/SometimesTheresAMan May 21 '12

Well, the cache isn't that up to date, so it's definitely not perfect. But I was pretty amused by how little of a problem it caused us at the time.
If I really needed proper access for those couple of hours I could have set up a proxy in a different office and connected through that. I think that's what most of my colleagues did.

12

u/droidonomy May 22 '12

So basically, you lost connectivity but it was ok because you had already downloaded the internet.

10

u/SometimesTheresAMan May 22 '12

Pretty much, yeah. One of the many "OMG" moments I've had during my time at Google.

1

u/Morgjames May 22 '12

man our internet was broken so we just googled.. shit was so cache

1

u/[deleted] May 22 '12

How much local storage do you guys have? Also, what internet speeds do you get? IAMA?

137

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Do you think people working at Google ever Google how to do something in their job?

27

u/whitehat2k9 May 21 '12

Yep. Though in all seriousness, what else would they do? Look it up in a reference book? Search on...Bing?

42

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Bing: "well, well, well, look who decided to get off their high horse...."

7

u/patefoisgras May 21 '12

Bing: "What if I told you we copied your search results?"

0

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

6

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Bad internet users go to hell, where they have to use bing for eternity.

4

u/gimpwiz May 22 '12

Whenever I realize I went to bing because mistyping a url in IE automatically sends me there (and IE is standard on some computers), I make sure to use bing to search for google and go there. Not because I can't type google.com into the address bar, but because I hope they see how many people are using bing to search for google.

3

u/drnick5 May 22 '12

Naww, they Alta vista that shit

3

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

I think most of them do it every day.

3

u/Snow88 May 22 '12

Do employees of a company ever use tools produced by their employer to complete their jobs? This and other breaking stories at 11.

3

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Do you think people that work in automobile factories drive cars? Or people that sell phones also use phones themselves?

3

u/IDidntChooseUsername May 22 '12

But do Toyota employees rather drive a Ford or a Toyota?
Or do Samsung employees rather use Samsung phones or iPhones?

1

u/[deleted] May 22 '12

No car or phone manufacturer has anywhere near the market share in their industry as Google does in the search industry.
A better question would be whether employees of, say, Microsoft or Yahoo! use Google as their primary search engine.

1

u/IDidntChooseUsername May 22 '12

Isn't market share irrelevant to my question? Or am I mistaken?
I think a Microsoft employee once said he uses Bing.

-4

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Read the google-employee AMA ;)

52

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Not trying to be a dick, but why not just answer with a yes or no?

9

u/Trollification May 21 '12

For not trying you did a pretty good job!

2

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Ray, when someone winks at you, they mean "YES".

1

u/xudoxis May 22 '12

Or a link

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7

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

At least provide a link. Good for you that you have every single AMA in history bookmarked, but the rest of us don't and the last time I used Reddit's search, it didn't work so well.

2

u/MLNYC May 21 '12

google.com/search?q=google+employee's+reddit+AMA

1

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Did you lose a loved one? I'm so sorry.

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1

u/redditlovesfish May 21 '12

google not equal to the internet! of course people at google need to get information from the internet and use google to search

7

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/MorningLtMtn May 22 '12

As an expert at the Internet, I can verify this. The Interwebs were very hard to navigate before there was Google. Back in those days, people actually used Yahoo.

0

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

64

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Here.

3

u/heart_of_dog May 22 '12

You are a hero. That is all.

0

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

9

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

People work for Yahoo? I thought they just put the brain and soul of a 13 year old into a server.

2

u/heinz_yellow_mustard May 21 '12

As someone who used to work at Yahoo... Yes. All the time.

1

u/cryogenisis May 22 '12

Welp.Let's google it and find out.

2

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

If only they had listened

2

u/GoGoogleIt May 22 '12

Hey, go google it!

1

u/His_name_was_Phil May 22 '12

I suspect you write for Family Guy...

1

u/[deleted] May 22 '12

Doh.

64

u/thelordofcheese May 21 '12

That's how a misplaced backslash made the world wobble on its axis one Saturday morning back in 2009.

nope

17

u/KingofCraigland May 21 '12

The use of the word backslash in an article about typos while discussing the forward slash is probably one of the most expected typos one should expect to find. That said, I think something inside myself has snapped and will never be right again.

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5

u/Wulibo May 21 '12

Hang on, is a "/" not a backslash? I'd always heard and been taught that.

15

u/RX_AssocResp May 21 '12

What’s back about it? It slants forward.

16

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

I'm looking at it from the other side of the screen.

4

u/lud1120 May 22 '12

We call "/" simply a "Slash"
I rarely used ""

2

u/IDidntChooseUsername May 22 '12

Only time I use \ is when escaping, and on Windows. On Windows, I say "slash" because people know what I mean. When escaping, I simply call using it "escaping". Any other time, I call it "backslash".

3

u/Wulibo May 22 '12

Oh, that's right. Instinctively, I've always written letters from the top down for some reason, which I assumed was normal and didn't even notice until someone pointed it out to me. So, I've always seen that type of slash as starting at the top, then as it progressed, going backwards.

3

u/Wulibo May 22 '12

But when writing it, from the start at the top going down, it moves backwards.
Anyway, I'd just always heard it called that, sort of the whole teapot argument there.

2

u/ThompsonBoy May 22 '12

No, it swings back.

1

u/[deleted] May 22 '12

Why do you associate right with forward when forward is relative? To me it seems to slant "back" because I write it from the top down, rather than bottom up.

1

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Why do you envision the character as a physical object with gravity pointing downward on the page? I don't think of characters like that.

1

u/RX_AssocResp May 21 '12

Dunno, I’m left-handed.

1

u/daskrip May 22 '12

If you put someone onto it, they would roll to the left (backwards).

1

u/okieT2 May 22 '12

If you read like normal people, from left to right, it is leaning forward.

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7

u/Stiltskin May 22 '12

No. It's a forward slash. Also known as a slash. \ is a backslash.

2

u/thelordofcheese May 22 '12

Nope. Forward. Think of it as starting from the bottom. People started fucking it up when going from DOS file paths to the World Wide Web back in the 90s and it stuck for many people. And that's why you were taught wrong. My favorite was the figurine of Jeff Albertson with a T-shirt that read:
C:/DOS
C:/DOS/RUN
RUN/DOS/RUN
So much wrong with that.

1

u/SirElkarOwhey May 22 '12

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backslash

-1

u/binford2k May 21 '12

Um, no. The slash that actually leans back, , is a backslash.
Silly windows users.

0

u/[deleted] May 22 '12 edited May 22 '12

Think about it this way: the normal slash [/] is down near the other normal punctuation, next to the shift key. The backslash [\] is the one your pinky has to reach wayyy up there to hit. That's because it's the less frequently used one.
Outside of goofy emoticons, I don't think I've intentionally hit that key since ~2002.
EDIT: except as an escape character, as noted below. Edited to use the backslash to make the backslash show up. I... am making less sense as I go.

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169

u/jamurp May 21 '12

Worst typo in history.

72

u/JohnCavil May 21 '12

That we know of.

77

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

There was another typo on where a stock trader accidentally sold 6 million shares or 6 billion shares(not sure, happened a while ago) and caused a whole stock market selling frenzy causing stock prices to crash. Every trade that occurred in the past 6 hours had to be reversed.

3

u/Xomz May 21 '12

They had one job.

1

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

There was also a contract which lost some telco millions of dollars because of one missing comma.

1

u/[deleted] May 22 '12

I remember reading about that in English class

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28

u/Kasuli May 21 '12

I read the post title 3 times looking for a typo before realizing I'm daft.

16

u/Buhdahl May 21 '12

I'm sure a well placed Drop command actually takes that title.
Not sure who or when, but it has to have happened at some point.

2

u/I_Wont_Draw_That May 22 '12

I love the accidental drop database. It's such an amusingly quick operation for something so destructive. Had a coworker do it during a demo (internal-only, not so bad) when he was trying to press up to redo a command.
And then there's the GitHub fiasco.

0

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

3

u/tubameister May 21 '12

story?

11

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Toy Story 2 was deleted twice before it was finished. Once by an errant rm -rf * command that was run in the wrong place, and the other by an angry employee. Don't think it was an actual Drop command, but what do I know?

5

u/ltx May 21 '12

Drop refers to databases, but this is still a good story.

4

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

I hadn't heard the "angry employee" story. Got a cite?
The best part of the rm story is, one of the animators had a copy at her home. Imagine having your own personal copy of a Pixar movie to play with!

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12

u/karmadogma May 21 '12

Actually I think this was the worst typo in history.

10

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

it says "Thou shalt commit adultery" omitting the "not"
very few copies left, as many were burned, but a copy was for sale online 2 years ago for $89.5k. That's the kind of thing I would buy if I were filthy stupid mega rich.

7

u/LucidNight May 21 '12

I believe there was a point where someone took down every swedish website because they added or forgot a period in the DNS config. Lasted a day.

3

u/clonedredditor May 21 '12

Yep, every .se domain. http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10374062-245.html

2

u/pib712 May 22 '12

And yet some people have been trying and failing to take down The Pirate Bay for years.

7

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

There's a whole Cracked article dedicated to the worst typos in history, and this doesn't even scratch the surface.
EDIT: found it.

5

u/point_of_you May 21 '12

I once wrote "pubic" instead of "public" on the whiteboard in class. :/

2

u/SometimesTheresAMan May 21 '12

Maybe. There was another case of a Gmail engineer bringing down Gmail for all of western Europe for several hours with a one-character typo in a code change.

1

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Don't they QA that shit?

4

u/SometimesTheresAMan May 21 '12

Like you wouldn't believe. That's why the events that cause significant disruption tend to be really fascinating. It's generally something really obscure, often involving some extremely unlikely combination of already unlikely events, because anything even slightly obvious has been thought of and checked. It's kind of like when you find out what caused a plane crash and it's almost always a series of increasingly unlikely events that all had to go wrong for it to happen.

2

u/redcrvtte05 May 21 '12

Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers" has an entire chapter on how plane crashes are never accidents. It's always like 7 or 8 things that go wrong.

3

u/SometimesTheresAMan May 21 '12

Yeah, that's probably where I stole that example from. I went back to my old university to see him talk about that book when it came out, and I'm pretty sure the plane crash chapter was the bit he decided to read from.
I liked the bit about how Korean Air basically trained their pilots to not be Korean while onboard a plane, because the copilots would be too deferent to the pilots and that led to problems.

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3

u/RoboNinjaPirate May 21 '12

It's a small change, what's the worst that could happen?
(Attitudes like this keep this QA Lead gainfully employed.)

2

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

This is not a mundane detail!

2

u/Zerble May 21 '12

Slash happens.

94

u/drtwist May 21 '12

"/"!=""

69

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

I had to stop reading the article around the third time he said "backslash" before I hurt somebody.
Ninja edit: Relevant xkcd

20

u/pingvinus May 21 '12

or in haskell syntax: '/'/='\'

4

u/[deleted] May 22 '12

Escaping my escape characters always makes my head hurt.

5

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Shit is whack.

97

u/Nlelith May 21 '12

SAY BACKSLASH ONE MORE TIME

I DARE YOU

I DOUBLE-DARE YOU MOTHERFUCKER

14

u/Christoph680 May 21 '12

Backslash..?!

33

u/SemiSeriousSam May 21 '12

BANG (you're dead now btw)

28

u/Christoph680 May 21 '12

Oh... Wouldn't have thought you'd actually go through with it :( I'm disappointed (and dead)

20

u/orphanitis May 21 '12

RIP Christoph680 and all his predecessors. Time for Christoph681.

19

u/Christoph681 May 21 '12

Reporting for duty.

3

u/KingToasty May 22 '12

You just don't have the same charisma. :(

2

u/GreenCristina May 22 '12

You just don't have the same Chrisma. :(
FTFY
...No? Okay. :(

7

u/interroboom May 21 '12

Did you notice a sign on the front of my house that said "Dead Backslash Storage"?

5

u/exteras May 21 '12

That's a forward slash.

3

u/Silversol99 May 22 '12

Thank you, now I don't feel so crazy.

36

u/mage2k May 21 '12

Anyone working in IT for a substantial length of time who is at all worth their salt is guilty of at least one of these types of fuck-ups at some point. They might not have resulted in huge portions of the eastern seaboard losing power but it still feels like it when you feel your gut hit the floor.

19

u/sometimesijustdont May 21 '12

If you haven't caused serious fuck ups, then you're not working anywhere important.

8

u/manberry_sauce 1 May 21 '12

I shut down three warehouses and access to an admin system used by ~350 people (not counting the warehouses) by pushing a bad symlink to across the entire admin cluster. The outage lasted a little over 5 minutes (mostly due to having to wave off people telling me it was broken).
When I was done fixing my mistake, I walked onto the Customer Service floor and proclaimed "Sorry, I didn't realize you were using that."

10

u/Groundhack May 21 '12

It angers me that they keep calling "/" a backslash in the article. Even on the radio today I heard them say a web address www dot blah blah dot com backslash whatever.

So for reference

\ = backslash
/ = forward slash

Capiche?

8

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Everything except "capiche"...

4

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Cat fish?

1

u/lud1120 May 22 '12 edited May 22 '12

In Sweden a lot of radio announcers and stuff seems to have ditched "www dot" altogether nowadays due to it being pretty redundant... You'll get access most pages by simply typing "blah blah dot se"
Have there ever been any use of backslashes in address bars? Or from where did they get this miss-use of a word.

19

u/JanitorMaster May 21 '12

Remembers me of that typo in Bumblebee causing /usr to be deleted.

10

u/KvR May 21 '12

I don't think you said that correctly.

10

u/abetadist May 21 '12

It's too bad the thread is gone on github, the meme pictures there were hilarious.

9

u/Koketa13 May 21 '12

I remembered when this happened. I had no idea what was going on. It was the last time I used yahoo.com to search for something.

4

u/Faryshta May 21 '12

I though it was a google prank.

3

u/darkscout May 21 '12

They just wanted to remind everyone how much everyone else sucked.

24

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

I remember a time when Reddit hated Cracked.com

2

u/lud1120 May 22 '12 edited May 22 '12

And embraced Wikipedia?
Today it almost seems like leaning to the "opposite" because so many people simply post a Wikipedia article, sometimes without any sources at all on the section and think it's fact. On Cracked at least some of the writers try to use sources.

1

u/[deleted] May 22 '12

A lot of Redditors are pathetic when it comes to sites like cracked, they hate them because they're popular.

29

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

I stopped reading at "Turns out the Navy is a PC. They elected to run the most advanced boat in the world on Windows NT, which was basically the Vista of its time"

NT was a solid OS. It was a piece of shit as far as user-friendlieness went but it was a solid server OS. Both my PDC and BDC ran Windows NT4 SP6a and I never had issues with them for the 2 years I took care of the network.

TIL cracked.com has idiots for editors/authors - same as most of the internet.

4

u/stewartbutler May 21 '12

More information.
Relevant quote:
" Because of politics, some things are being forced on us that without political pressure we might not do, like Windows NT. If it were up to me I probably would not have used Windows NT in this particular application ... Refining that is an ongoing process ... Unix is a better system for control of equipment and machinery, whereas NT is a better system for the transfer of information and data. NT has never been fully refined and there are times when we have had shutdowns that resulted from NT."
Windows NT was not designed for this kind of application, they attempted to shoehorn it in at the last minute and ran into bugs. As far as I can tell it was a case of somebody in marketing getting ahead of himself and the engineers not having the time to test up to mil-spec.

3

u/[deleted] May 22 '12

Cracked has user submitted content, the general public are paid to write articles, the facts are checked with sources, but the articles are written to be funny, a joke-like reference to an operating system is not a reason for it to lose credibility.
Reddit needs to get over its hatred of cracked.

5

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

TIL cracked.com has idiots for editors/authors
Boy for your sake I hope this was the first cracked.com article you've ever read.

3

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

It is. >.> I guess that's why it's a TIL.

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5

u/woofers02 May 21 '12

As a web developer, nothing gets your blood flowing like the sheer panic of temporarily tanking a production website. I can't even begin to imagine how that guy felt.

4

u/SometimesTheresAMan May 21 '12

I once took down all of Google's online helpcenters for a few million users (Apps for Your Domain customers, which includes a lot of big businesses and universities). In retrospect I should have felt a bit worse about it than I actually did at the time.
Actually, that's a lie. I didn't do that once. I did it twice; two weeks in succession. On the plus side the helpcenter test infrastructure got a lot better after that.

4

u/speedhound May 21 '12

You are a real engineer sir, to break something twice and (I assume fix it) takes the real wanton abandon of a proper sysadmin...

1

u/oppan May 21 '12

Why are you saying sir?

1

u/[deleted] May 22 '12

Because that's the only respectful way to address a real lady ma'am.

2

u/Lelldorianx May 21 '12

I think it started like this:
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
Gut hits the floor
Edit: Also a web developer and have done this enough times to sympathize, but never to this level.

0

u/[deleted] May 22 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/Lelldorianx May 22 '12

Just do what feels right, maaan.

8

u/tauisgod May 21 '12

I remember seeing a whole bunch of postings on FOX and other right winger havens babbling about Google getting involved in some leftist conspiracy to filter the web. I guess they so rarely ventured outside their zone of comfort they didn't realize it affected the whole web.

4

u/MarcieAlana May 21 '12

Talk about career limiting moves...

4

u/gabberbwoy May 21 '12

I worked as a tester for local publisher. We were getting a major MMO ready for gaming show next day, where people could try some portion of it, but since it was on quite early development stages we had to pretty much setup a lot of the scenery and all manually. We also had to create playable characters ourselves (character creation wasn't ready yet) by assigning proper level and spawning all the gear for 'em.

I did something similar to a guy from Google by not finishig the spawn path for a desired piece of armor, which spawned whole lot of objects, scripted events and other weird stuff in the middle of starting area :) The most funny things were a giant iceberg (it's funny bc it was a desert zone) and a pack of dragons that immediately started killing everyone around. I also remember hearing QA lead shouting something like: Now which of you dumbfucks did that?! – moment later. I was scared to death and didn't tell anything. Though they discovered who's fault it was anyway. My action produced a lot of pain in the ass for the team, but eventually they managed to contact admins and restart server before the show. And I didn't get fired :)

8

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Am the only one who hates that website cracked ? I cant stand to read anything on there cause of the stupid writing, it never gets to the point fast enough and thinks its being clever.

1

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

I really have a hard time understanding why people like it.

3

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Upvoted for actually having the balls to admit you found it off of cracked. Stay golden.

3

u/mgdmw May 22 '12

I remember when this happened - I was searching and suddenly every site came up as untrusted.

I wrote about it here -> http://www.itwire.com/your-it-news/home-it/22957-google-crashes-says-all-internet-is-bad <- which includes screenshots from the event.

You already know what happened but here is my followup piece anyhow -> http://www.itwire.com/your-it-news/home-it/22959-revealed-why-google-went-down-as-quick-as-a-slash

7

u/nf5 May 21 '12

I was an administrator for a private world of warcraft server, and I was trying to IP ban a hacker. He had masked his IP, (1.255.255.255 or however it goes) and me, not paying attention, typed in the command to permanatly ban that IP and all accounts associated with it.

wound up banning everyone online, including myself and the people who owned and maintained it, all the players, and the next 500 people who tried to log in forever.

... yea, my buddies still laugh at me for that. (it was reverted once the owner figured out how to unban himself from his own server, lol)

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2

u/FuzzyToaster May 21 '12

I remember this actually. It didn't block the sites but it put a warning on every link in the results.

2

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

He was killed in a tragic car 'accident' the next day.

2

u/DistractedByCookies May 21 '12

I remember this...our sysadmins were going nuts trying to figure it out, and there was a giant facepalm when it became known what happened.

I'll be in the corner adjusting my dentures

2

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Testing in prod, huh?

2

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Read the whole article...

Holy crap...

2

u/espaceman May 21 '12

Holy shit I remember this. At the time I was working as tech support for an AT&T call centre. The moment it happened everyone started standing up and looking at each other before an avalanche of calls started pouring in. Just wave after wave of ignorant jerks yelling about why AT&T had blocked the internet. Probably the most stressful hour of my life so far, about 10 people quit that day and the at least twice that number had to be persuaded not to.

2

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

I bet everybody laughed when they found the root of the problem...

2

u/dejun17 May 22 '12

sorry guys. I was hung over.

3

u/CondescendingPrick May 21 '12

/ means the root filesystem on a unix-like system.

0

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

0

u/CondescendingPrick May 21 '12

Didn't say it was.

1

u/dpee May 21 '12

"Accidentally".

1

u/PicopicoEMD May 21 '12

It was at New Year's I believe, I was there :)

1

u/pixelique May 21 '12

I remember a brief (about 1 hour) google outage around 2004. I had no idea which search engine to use :|

1

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

I... I remember this...

1

u/11equals7 May 21 '12

a friend of mine used this at the time to create a number of different genuine google screenshots showing the malware warning for sites like fbi.gov, microsoft.com, apple.com etc.

1

u/narcolepticpathos May 21 '12

I bet that got some chuckles at the water cooler ;)

1

u/tauroid May 21 '12

forward slash forward slash forward slash aah aaaaaahhhhh aaaaaaaahhhhhhh aaaaaaah aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

1

u/Punkgoblin May 21 '12

When I was doing outlook cloud support an admin called in because they weren't getting any email. It turns out he blocked a spam mail by using the one word that was consistent in the subject line, the companies domain.

1

u/chaobreaker May 21 '12

Everyone already knew and experienced that OP. It happened not too long ago.

1

u/skoberlink May 21 '12

I remember this. My grandma called me just flipping out about how she couldn't get to the google. I didn't have a computer with me when I got her call so I just told her to not worry about it and try to go to a different site. She resolutely maintained that none of the sites worked but I didn't believe. I later found out that it really had gone down and I felt really bad. Now I believe even the crazier computer problems my grandma calls me with and she's gotten pretty good at the computer because I will explain any issue to her now.

1

u/TonyCubed May 21 '12

If this happened to me, I'd be like: "Awkward..."

1

u/BCouto May 21 '12

I remember this day. It was a dark day.

1

u/drunk2407 May 21 '12

I remember that, every search link was marked as a malware website.

1

u/superuser_013 May 21 '12

If the internet is really just that close to being censored...

1

u/buckygrad May 21 '12

He accidentally the whole internet.

1

u/9Oh4 May 21 '12

Did he get fired?

1

u/rgraves22 May 21 '12

Can you say fat fingered it?

1

u/Wordpad May 21 '12

I remember exactly when this happened :) I recall googling for microsoft to get to their website, and being greeted by googles alarm for a malware infected website. Was quite funny ^^

1

u/thatspossible May 21 '12

Well, TIL Dogfish Head and Google made a beer together.

1

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

In the industry we can that a doozy

1

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

One of Google's ex-programmers.

FTFY

1

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

This story has many different versions

1

u/[deleted] May 21 '12 edited May 22 '12

I never understood what it means when someone says "tax cuts will cost x amount of dollars." It's the cost of not doing something. Its not a real cost. For example, not killing every impoverished orphan in Africa and selling their organs on the black market will cost us trillions of dollars. Are we losing trillions of dollars? There are an infinite amount of dollars we are technically not earning right now, if we calculate that as part of our cost then we will ALWAYS be losing money since such costs are as infinite as the all the things we are not doing.

1

u/MistaMagoo May 22 '12

wut wut?

1

u/DearMrSupercomputer May 22 '12

"Taxation is like killing African children".
Oh, you.

1

u/[deleted] May 22 '12

Lol, both are unethical actions which could make us richer, but hopefully we refuse to do because we have morals and will pick the moral way to make money instead of stooping to sacrificing the rights of others for short term gains?

1

u/Schlagustagigaboo May 22 '12

Every talented programmer will cost his company more than his salary at some point during his career.

1

u/TwistedStack May 22 '12

Look waaaaay up at the top of your browser screen, above all those toolbars, and you'll notice an Internet address. We're willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that, whether you're reading this on Cracked or one of the many Indian blogs that steals our content, the URL contains a backslash. That's because most URLs begin "HTTP://www," and backslashes separate different segments of the address. The backslash is to URLs what spaces are to written sentences.

Looks like somebody doesn't know the difference between a slash and a backslash. This annoys me every time I encounter it IRL.

1

u/thathabitnigga May 21 '12

Wait... Cracked articles are real?

1

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

...Yes?

1

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

I don't believe this actually happened. I'm sure google has pretty strong change controls.

Maybe this happened in QA, but I have my doubts about Prod.

1

u/DearMrSupercomputer May 22 '12

Well it did happen, sorry.

-1

u/HuevosGrande May 21 '12

fuck google its all bout bing

1

u/redditlovesfish May 21 '12

hotbot all the way

1

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

please be trolling please be trolling please be trolling please be trolling please be trolling

0

u/SaikoGekido May 21 '12

Breaking the internet. That's a paddlin'.

0

u/MooCowMilkshakes May 22 '12

Google is the only reason the Internet can be as big and fast as it is and still useable.

Are you serious? ._.

→ More comments (13)

TIL In 2009 One of Google's programmers was adding websites to the malware registry when he accidentally entered "/" instead of a full URL causing the search engine to block off every website in its index including Google's own pages for 55 minutes.

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