Google malfunction leads to all sites being branded "dangerous spam"

Melbourne, Feb 1 (ANI): For 40 minutes yesterday, Internet was all "spam" - as search engine 'mogul' Google was brought to a standstill after an employee mistakenly clogged-up any access to web pages through its site.

Web users were stunned to see erroneous messages between 1:30am and 2:25am last night reporting that every site turned up in their results might be harmful, reports News.com.au.

Google blamed the problem on human error and apologised to users and site owners whose pages were incorrectly labelled.

"Anyone who did a Google search during that time likely saw the message 'This site may harm your computer'' accompanying every search result, the company said on its blog.

Google said the message is regularly used to flag sites known to install malicious software in the background or surreptitiously to protect users.

The glitch was caught by on-call staff and the file was quickly fixed, Google said.

"We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in to prevent it from happening again,'' said Marissa Mayer, vice-president of search products and user experience, in the statement. (ANI)