Not Even a Broken Internet Can Stop Kevin Durant
The Internet broke this morning, when any Google Image search brought up one of two images: a 2012 Ukranian car crash, or NBA MVP and Longhorn basketball star Kevin Durant. One of those is bad, and one is very, very good. Neither is what most users search for, but it doesn’t seem to be the work of a hacker. Russell Brandom of the Verge told NPR’s Here & Now that the glitch was more likely the result of an innocent mistake at Google than a malicious attack.
“If it’s a hack, someone is usually looking for some sort of information they can sell, whether it’s credit card data, email addresses, logins, or to put some malicious bit of code on your site,” Brandom said. “Maybe if you clicked on this image, it would take you to the site and it would put some malicious code on your computer, but I haven’t seen any indication of that.”
Google is also, obviously, tweaking code on a consistent basis, so glitches will appear from time to time.
“People are constantly pushing code changes to Google image search,” Brandom said. “My suspicion is something changed, someone screwed up, and they fixed it.”
The photo of Durant is a screengrab from the heartfelt MVP acceptance speech he gave in May. If you missed the speech, it’s still very much worth a watch.
By now, everything is back to normal with Google, but at 9 a.m., TIME tried an image search for “puppy,” which yielded, in addition to the crash and Durant, a few really cute puppies.
Google hasn’t commented on what caused the glitch, which is now fixed, unless this is your idea of a pure and true Internet. Whatever happened, it really says something about the duality of life. Tragedy and triumph. And occasionally puppies.
Top image via Reddit user acrantrad, bottom image via Time.com
