Bangalore: The world was not built in a moment but a single little moment is what we need to destroy it. We usually term some mistakes as ‘silly’ but they can go on to have major repercussions. Read on to find out how tiny little computer glitches caused disasters of epic proportions.

1. Google messed up, blocked the entire internet:

What do you do normally do when you need a piece of information? You say, “Lets Google this.” Don’t you? The world relies on Google for their work, personal and social lives. The company protects users from virus inflicted sites and malware. Try opening a flagged site and Google will not let you do it. That is the big brotherly attitude the search giant shows. And we don’t hear the world complaining.

The disaster:

Now imagine a scenario when you friendly neighborhood superhero Google messes up and accidentally block every site on the internet. It will lead to absolute chaos. On 31 January 2010 Google did just that. Every website was flagged and blocked. This glitch remained for 40 minutes and cost the world $ 2-3 billion of advertising revenue, apart from the state of confusion the world was subjected to.

The tiny glitch: A typo

Google in association with StopBadware.org monitors the web for potentially dangerous software by regularly updating the list of flagged sites. One of Google’s programmers was adding sites to the list when he accidentally types ‘/ ‘ instead of entering the entire URL. Because of this tiny typo every website on the internet was marked as dangerous and was thus blocked.

It was a silly typo that caused this disaster of epic proportions.