It must have surprised the internet users on Saturday, when Google put the entire web on blacklist. With every search, Google issued a warning message, “This site may harm your computer”. The search engine defamed some of its own services, and it went on for almost an hour. What went awry with Google?

In a statement, Google clarified that the “search results glitch” was caused by Human error, and it was Google's mistake not StopBadware.org's. Explicating the glitch, the company stated that an update to its list of URLs known to install malicious software was released on Saturday morning, and unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs."

In an official Google blog post, Google Vice President of Search Products & User Experience Marissa Mayer wrote, "Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file."

In her first blog, Mayer signaled that StopBadware.org, which is used by Google and other IT companies and academic institutions to warn internet users of malicious sites, was responsible for the “search results glitch,” but in a later blog, she clarified that “the problem was on Google's end”.

Responding to Mayer’s first blog, StopBadware, in its blog wrote, "Google generates its own list of badware URLs, and no data that we generate is supposed to affect the warnings in Google's search listings."

Apologizing to sites that were wrongly labeled as malicious, Mayer wrote, "We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again.”