StopBadAware provide an  service to google, to prevent users from visiting phishing sites, or sites with trojans and all kinds of nasty stuff. You may have noticed on the odd occasion when you try and browse somewhere dangerous from Google, you receive the warning “This site may harm your computer.” If you try and visit the site, you’ll instead see a page which informs you “Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer!”.

Within the last 10minutes, it looks like StopBadAware servers went down. This has caused havok with Google Search. Any search brings up the usual results, but no links are live right now – click to any website from Google, and you’ll be greeted with the messages above. It’s madness, almost as if the Internet is on Hold, waiting for StopBadAware to get their act together.

Epic Fail

We’ll keep you updated throughout the day, and let you know what the problem was with SBA.

[Update] Looks like Google is back up and running. Who asked for them to ‘protect’ us anyway?

[Update] Google have informed us (via their blog) that the problem was all down to human erorr. Some newb had accidentaly confirmed a ‘/’ as a malware site, thus blocking the entire Interwebs for just over half an hour.

“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.”