Google Doodle has made a major blunder by failing to honor the 70th anniversary of D-Day on Friday, June 6, 2014, angering Internet users who took to Twitter to voice out their frustration.
One Twitter user laments how Google "has some 'seriously' messed up priorities" while another wonders why Google can come up with "a digital Rubik's cube but fail to remember D-Day at the 70th anniversary."
Google originally posted a cartoon image of Honinbo Shusaku, a Japanese player of the traditional Chinese game Go, who would be celebrating his 185th birthday on the same day, on Thursday evening. However, Friday morning saw the image of the Japanese champion removed and replaced with a "Remembering D-Day" link on the U.S., U.K. and France Google home pages, though Hong Kong and Japan's Google pages still contain the Honinbo Shusaku doodle.
The new link leads users to Google's Cultural Institute site, which has published content about the Normandy landings, including new material that has been published for the first time and content prepared in cooperation with France's Mémorial de Caen. Google Doodle says it had always been planning to honor the 70th anniversary of D-Day, which marked the invasion of the Allied Forces of Nazi-held Europe and saw the death of more than 10,000 Allied soldiers, but a "technical error" occurred.
"We've always intended to highlight a new exhibition of imagery and archive material commemorating D-Day on our home page," says Peter Barron, director of communications at Google. "Unfortunately, a technical error crept in and for a short period this morning an international doodle also appeared. We're sorry for the mistake, and we're proud to honor those who took part in D-Day."
On June 6, 1944, Allied forces landed on Western Europe in what is known as the largest seaborne invasion in history, which led to the restoration of the French Republic and contributed largely to the Allied success in World War II.
Google Doodle has evolved from being a fun, quirky bonus on the Google home page to a full-blown feature complete with its own team of artists and engineers. The first doodle appeared in 1998 when Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin drew a stick figure of a man inserted in the second "o" of the Google logo to indicate that they were at the Burning Man Festival.
Google has released more than 2,000 doodles since then and this is not the first time it has ignored D-Day anniversaries in favor of other events in history. In 2009, instead of publishing a D-Day doodle in commemoration of the historic event, Google published a doodle celebrating the founding of the game "Tetris." On the same day three years after, Google Doodle honored the first drive-in theater.
