A guy over on the blog has some good thoughts on this whole deal, and I agree with most of it:
"An apology is always nice, but if they had bothered to TEST the update before it was released this would not have happened. I’d be glad to wait the extra five minutes it would have taken someone to have tested this update and prevented this problem, perhaps this will be a wake-up call that releasing a bad update of any kind can cause real problems. A popup on Avast.com saying something like "Notice: Avast update problem causing false infection warnings, please be advised we are working to fix the problem.", would have been a large help. The first thing I thought was someone hacked Avast’s server, let’s see bad update released stopping people from going on internet, followed by Avast’s server going offline, followed with NO information on their site? At least I had other machines without Avast! running active, so I could get on the net and a phone call to my friend told me that it was not just me. So I’m glad Avast! was not hacked, but would it have been a different outcome if they had? We depend on our software to be flawless and the people supplying it to be flawless, too. So, as this all shows, most of use don’t have real world skills that before would have stopped the panic. You know if the cable goes dead, call the company, if the phone goes dead, walk next door, if all your sites are infected after an update, try turning off the active protection or call someone else to see if it’s just you or maybe someone you know is not using Avast! and see if they are having problems? We really are in sorry shape and it shows. This is why the fake e-mail virus warnings cause so much problems."
So we're not stupid, just out of practice and more than a little insecure it seems.
My boy got the update and tried running the boot scan as we are so often told to do, which did start showing all kinds of infected files, files he knew were not infected, so he shut his system down, stopping many important files from being moved. It would seem many others were not so lucky (see the blog). My friends where lucky, when they realized something was wrong they either turned their machines off or did nothing until they could talk to me. By that time I had the answers, but not everyone does twitter, facebook, blogs, forums or has someone they can ask. People say we live in the age of communication, or as I often say, the age of miscommunication.