I know that no company is safe from mistakes, but something like this should have shown up in the unit/system testing before it was released. Considering it affected a majority of the users, how could something like this slip through? I'm a software developer, so I know minor bugs can creep through testing, but to me, this was one major snafu that didn't affect a small user base and it wasn't a "bug" that affected certain configurations. It affected everyone that had the update applied.
Let's put it his way. I decided to go ahead and do a full scan and Avast had scanned about 4% of my system and already flagged over 600 files as infected and quarantined them as infected. I then decided to get on my laptop and see if maybe something had happened with Avast and an update, just like McAfee last year.
Once I saw that, I then loaded up a virtual machine on my "infected" machine and downloaded another AV product to see if I could scan it that way since Avast was "corrupted". I couldn't go to any other AV sites on the "infected" machine because Avast was flagging them all as Malware infected sites. Funny how only Avast's site was immune to this!
In any case, the other AV didn't detect one single virus, although Avast kept popping up that the other AV was an infected program trying to harm my machine. I promptly uninstalled Avast and ran the scan again with the other AV and it came back clean.
I'm back up and operational, but this really caused issues at home. Both my daughters needed a computer to do their homework, so instead of having the PC and the laptop, they had to share the laptop which caused some issues because they both couldn't work on their projects for school at the same time since one machine was out of service.
No financial loss occurred for us, but productivity for my daughters was hampered and they had to stay up later than usual to get all their homework done because of this. I started trying to fix the problem at 4:30 pm and wasn't done until almost midnight between searching and doing full system scans.
Hopefully, this is a lesson learned that Awil will take seriously to ensure that full unit/system testing is done before pushing out updates. Since this has happened before with other AV companies, I hope all companies will take this issue to heart and ensure that better testing and QA is done before releasing updates to something as important as an AV program.