The time filter in Google Search broke a few days ago

Google’s search time filter — the simple tool people use to find newer or older results — apparently broke for days, and the internet’s reaction was less panic and more "wow, this is where we are now?" That was the vibe from designer Marcin Wichary’s viral Mastodon post, which landed like a tiny digital horror story: a core Google Search feature stops working, and the world mostly shrugs. For longtime web users, that felt almost more shocking than the bug itself.

But the comments? Absolutely merciless. One camp went straight for the big-company competence crisis, with users asking how giant firms packed with elite workers and giant budgets keep shipping obvious mistakes. One commenter basically said, if this happened at my company, it would be fixed in minutes — a classic furious-manager flex. Another piled on by wondering what kind of testing is even happening anymore, especially after Facebook’s translation apparently also went haywire recently.

Then came the spicier theory: maybe companies are so obsessed with artificial intelligence that they’re sending bots to do jobs humans used to check properly. And of course, the joke brigade showed up too, with one very online quip suggesting the feature may have collapsed under the weight of everyone filtering for "three years or older" just to escape AI-generated junk. Even the side drama got sharp, with Alex Russell taking a swipe at Google’s judgment by bringing up a past layoff. The real headline here isn’t just a broken filter — it’s the growing public mood that the biggest tech platforms feel strangely flimsy now, and people are getting louder about it.