Saturday morning, a misplaced “/” rendered Google Incorporated’s malware warning system to label every website offered as a result for a search performed by users as harmful and dangerous for their computers.

The glitch messed with Google searches from 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST, a time-frame during which Internet surfers, when displayed the warning message, followed a link leading to StopBadware.org, a nonprofit project conducted by legal scholars at Harvard and Oxford universities researching consumer complaints.

The heavy traffic prompted StopBadware.org to temporarily take the site offline.

After the incident, Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of search products and user experience, posted an apology on Google’s blog and revealed that the issue had arisen from a human error.

She informed that the company usually flagged search results with the message „This site may harm your computer” if they had information that the site installed malicious software in the background, in order to protect users from harmful websites.

Mayer added that Google periodically updated that list and that Saturday morning, such an update had been released, but that unfortunately it had been set to apply to all URLs.

The glitch also affected Google's Gmail service, with messages having been labeled as spam, Rishi Chandra, senior product manager for Google Apps, having announced in a blog post that they were working on an automated fix so as to move all the harmless messages back to in-boxes.

Chandra stated that as of Sunday, the fix had been introduced and put to work, still she advised users to check all the messages that had been flagged as spam that they had received between 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. PST on Saturday.