In January 2009, Marissa Mayer – by her own admission – broke the internet.
As Google’s vice-president of search products, Ms Mayer was responsible for what was then the world’s most popular website. An errant “/” in a computer code had triggered a chain of events that resulted in the message “This site may harm your computer” popping up alongside every search result.
“It was as if the internet was broken,” she told Newsweek . “I work well under pressure, but I began to have this horrifying sense of just how many millions of people were looking at their computer screens thinking, what is going on? And how many of them were clicking straight over to Yahoo.”