Google Blocks TwitPic Over Malware Threat, Then Restores Access

If there's one thing you don't want to happen when you run a website, it's for Google to shun you. Or worse. Today, that "worse" bit happened to one of the web's largest hosts of image files, used extensively on websites and social media. TwitPic, for some odd reason, was picked up in the latest Google sweep of malware sites, which meant that each visitor to TwitPic was shown a fairly frightening message saying that continuing to the website could endanger their PC. That's obviously terrible for TwitPic, as these kinds of things can stir up the kind of negative stigma that's hard to shake.


This evening, however, Google's weekend engineers managed to reverse the block, but we're still seeing it blocked sporadically. At the very least, this acts as confirmation that TwitPic isn't actually malicious, and you shouldn't worry over linking to it or hosting your own images there.


Talk about just in time: tomorrow night, we're guessing that millions upon millions of New Year's Eve images will flood TwitPic's servers, and having this kind of message attached to 'em would've been truly awful.