A Poltergeist was loose on the Web Thursday morning.

 

At 8:40 Eastern time, Google search crashed and was not back up until a little over an hour later. Google Calendar and Gmail were affected as well.

 

So, your Gmail was down, and you went to Facebook to send some messages to friends. You had a note in your Inbox from a pal, subject line, “Hello.” Inside was just the domain name "151.im."

 

Don’t click on that link! Don’t put it into your browser, either. It’s the latest “phishing” virus on Facebook.

 

TechCruch [1] has the following statement from Facebook: 

 

“We’re well aware of this and are already blocking links to these new phishing sites from being shared on Facebook. We’re also cleaning up phony messages and Wall posts and resetting the passwords of affected users. We think this is related to the fbaction.net/fbstarter.com campaign of a couple weeks ago. You can read more about how we respond to phishing in our recent blog post here [2].”

 

As for Google's fail – An Asian traffic jam is being named as the culprit. The Google Blog [3] has this -- er, colorful explanation. Who says Google is boring?

 

"Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That’s basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.

 

An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We’ve been working hard to make our services ultrafast and “always on,” so it’s especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We’re very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we’ll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won’t happen again. All planes are back on schedule now."