It's time to admit that data entry errors happen. A year or two ago, someone told me at ISPCON that his biggest fear about his own data center is a technician mistyping a command.

That happened to Google just a few days ago, resulting effectively in an outage lasting about an hour. It was one character. As internetnews notes, "Forward Slash Led to Massive Google Glitch".

Some are saying that no system should be so vulnerable to a typo that a single errant character could shut it down, but I think that any ISP that runs its own anti-spam system would admit to similar issues. Some have even designed that all-too-perfect spam filter, the one that blocks all e-mail.

The fact that a system could be brought down by a single errant keystroke is no surprise. Instead, companies need to have checks and balances. But checking an employees' work requires having another employee to do that (generally, they're called "managers") and in this economy, it seems that not even Google can afford them.