Was Google Images hacked yesterday?
If you happened to search for anything on Google’s Image Search yesterday, you might have noticed things were a little off. That’s because the site was apparently hacked, with the mischeivous attackers ensuring that every search resulted in repeated pictures of a fatal car crash possibly in Ukraine or Moscow.
The bug apparently affected searchers from across the globe, with reports coming from the U.S., the UK, Australia and South America.
Time said that the bug lasted for several hours, with the North American Google Images page dominated by the car accident image no matter what the user searched for – be it puppies, pancakes or porn. Jalopnik said the picture may have come from an article published in 2012, which shows a car crash at a Moscow bus stop that killed three people. Users in South America also reported similar search results no matter what query they entered.
Numerous netizens took to Twitter to complain that the hack or glitch or whatever it was had been going on for several hours:
Has Google Images seriously been hacked for over 5 hours now?? This is getting kind of ridiculous pic.twitter.com/5V565XObYA
— Nora Gilmartin (@LesVivants) August 26, 2014
There was a lively thread on Reddit too, where some users reported that images of NBA star Kevin Durant had also been thrown into the mix. Reddit user Acrantrad posted the following screenshot that showed up after unrelated searches.
Image credit: Acrantrad via Reddit
Google has since confirmed to Time that the problem has been fixed, though it wouldn’t say if the incident was a hack. However, it would take a strange glitch to cause the same weird results to show up on three different continents.
Main image credit: Nemo via Pixabay.com
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