The 1975's Website Has A Glitch And It Might've Just Broke Google

6 June 2018, 12:24

By Woodrow Whyte

@woodrowwhyte

And this is how you disable it.

The 1975 love a cryptic album campaign. They've done it all: countdown clocks, mysterious notes sent to journalists in the mail, deleting old social media posts - the amount of tricks up the band's sleeve are endless.

But fans were left confused after a Google glitch involving a typo, The 1975's webpage and Android phones started displaying personal SMS messages and people weren't entirely sure if it was definitely glitch or a stunt by the band.

Last week people discovered that if you typed "the1975..com" (with the extra '.') into the Google Search app and Google Assistant on Android phones, it would cause your text messages to be displayed in your search results. Weird, right?

As NME notes, users on social media started posting pictures of the results. One user asked "It’s like just about the weirdest glitch I have come by. Is this combination just a super random coincidence or is there something else going on?”

According to Mashable, other Android users reported similar results after searching for the phrases "Vizel viagens," "Izela viagens, and "Zela viagens." 

A Google spokesperson told Mashable that it's fixing what it calls a "language detection bug," where these phrases are getting "erroneously interpreted as a request to view recent text messages." The bug can be deactivated by disabling the privacy setting that gives the Google Assistant permission to view text messages.

That didn't stop people from tweeting conspiracy theories that Matty and the boys are plotting some sort of technology pranks as part of their promo campaign for their forthcoming albums, A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships and Notes On A Conditional Form. I mean, it's not, but we wouldn't put it passed them.

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