Google Hurries to Congratulate Russia on World Cup Results… and Offends Russians

Google is well known for its passion to various doodles to celebrate tons of global and local events – quite frequently the company changes its logo on the pages of all the local domains or only on specific ones depending on the event of the day. As some of you may know, yesterday Russia had more than a significant reason to celebrate as FIFA made the decision to hold the World Cup in 2018 in Russia – for the first time in Eastern Europe.

Of course Russian football fans and pretty much everyone else are exceptionally pleased with the opportunity and celebrating. To support the celebration, Google offered a new doodle for the Russian domain with the Russian flag and footballs.

This special attention to our seemingly local celebration from the international internet giant is no doubt nice if not for one fact: someone in the Google office made a mistake in the colors of our flag so it was white-red-blue instead of the correct white-blue-red.

Russian users who were online discussing the news despite of the late night hour (it was after 1 a.m. in Moscow) quickly noticed the error and someone must have reported it to Google. This resulted in pulling the doodle altogether closer to 2 a.m. and then restoring it with the one showing correct flag.

Google’s Russian office was contacted for an explanation and offered one: they claim an employee made a mistake and used the wrong colors. Obviously, they also offered an apology to the country and internet users who obviously are offended with the mistake now.

Not to complicate things further, here I have only uploaded the correct version of the doodle with the Russian flag (I know it is not the easiest one to remember) but for those of you who want some proof that the entire situation existed, here is the link in Russian proving it did happen, no matter how crazy it might sound.