Whitey - 11:41 pm on Mar 21, 2013 (gmt 0)

Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, said on Hacker News, "we were tackling a spammer and inadvertently took action on the root page of digg.com." Google released an official statement as well: "We're sorry about the inconvenience this morning to people trying to search for Digg. In the process of removing a spammy submitted link on Digg.com, we inadvertently applied the webspam action to the whole site. We're correcting this, and the fix should be deployed shortly." [seroundtable.com...]

A timely example that errors do occur, but may not be treated equally unless you're a brand.