The Early Blogger

It was the shock of the moment. It caused a tremendous panic which gives a chill to the nerve. It was the worst scare in most bloggers’ life. The incident happened sometime between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m of February 01, 2009 when the web went awry. Various speculations came out. Some thought it was literally the doomsday of the bloggers and online users alike. Others thought Google declared a categorical web invasion. Still others pondered of a possible internet hacking of Google itself. The Google technical shut out occurred for around 40 minutes but the fear it caused is much like a lifetime.

Screenshot of the Google Search of that time:

Here’s what it shows when you click the above search results “Horrifying!”

Some were very anxious to know the root cause of the incident, and after so much digging, the culprit was finally revealed. The culprit? It was just a slash. Here is a portion of the explanation of Google:

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.

And now we know… who knows it might happen again the future…But the world wide web is here to stay…