We’re not quite sure what’s going on, but a couple of minutes ago any search result from Google started being flagged as malware with a message stating “This site may harm your computer”.

Twitter is abuzz with people reporting the massive error (also look for tags #googmayharm or #googmayhem), and it’s clear that this is happening around the world. Apparently, it’s happening with any browser on any platform too.

Clicking the message takes people to a support page from Google, but this is being bombarded with millions of people right now so it’s very slow to respond. I saw the page briefly, and it pointed to StopBadware.org (which is obviously also loading slowly right now).

Update: it seems to be fixing itself. I’m having no more issues on Google Belgium, still getting warning messages for malicious software when I search Google.com. Also, it only seems to occur when you’re searching as a signed-in user now.

Update 2: it seems to be fine now. Lasted about 15 minutes (Google says the window was more like 55 minutes). You can take a deep breath now and go on with whatever you were doing before :)

Now we just have to wait for Google to tell us what went wrong. It’s quite clear that a meltdown of this size, no matter how short it was, will be the topic of discussion for the coming days (and not only at the Googleplex, I’d wager).

Update 3: Marissa Mayer has now explained the error on the Official Google Blog. She puts it down to human error after a ‘/’ was mistakenly put in an update sent from the non-profit StopBadware.org to Google (the non-profit also posted more details). The result was every URL in Google’s database being classified as “malware” until the stray ‘/’ was removed.