Google Chrome Experiment Gone Horribly Wrong; Caused Massive Outages Worldwide

The search engine giant recently conducted an unannounced experiment that has horribly gone wrong. The issue, which was first observed on Wednesday, crashed thousands of browsers and enterprise for almost two days. Google Chrome’s latest issue did not affect all Chrome users, but only those running on Windows Server setups common in enterprise networks.

Countless user reports described the experience as Google Chrome tabs immediately going blank, which is also known as the White Screen of Death (WSOD) error. System administrators in most companies reported that employees could not use Chrome to gain access on the internet since the active browser keeps on going blank.

Many employees, especially those in tightly controlled environments, have no option to change browsers and were left paralyzed to proceed with their tasks online. System administrators could not simply change Google Chrome with any browser immediately. The recent issue has a huge impact on all our call center agents unable to chat with our members, ZDNet reports airing the concern of someone with a Costco email address.

Other Google Chrome users shared their experiences on various online forums, including Google’s support forum, Reddit, and Chrome bug tracker, among others. One user reported that they initially thought that the Chrome blank tab issue was a sign of malware and launched a network-wide security audit. With time, Google was able to trace the root of the issue and blamed it for the feature called Web Contents Occlusion.

According to the design document of Google Chrome, this is an experimental feature that hangs Chrome tabs when users other apps on top of Google Chrome. The browser treats the active Chrome tab is a background tab. The search engine giant intends that the feature improve the resource usage of Chrome when it is not being used.

It has been under testing in Chrome Beta, and Chrome Canary releases all year. Surprisingly, the search engine giant decided to run a test on the feature in the main Stable release in order to get more feedback on how it will behave. With the ruckus, it cost companies all over the world, describing the experiment as badly behaving is a brutal understatement.