AVG issued a public statement yesterday, admitting that its free antivirus software mistakenly identified iTunes as a Trojan virus over the weekend. Due to false alarms, many users were unable to access iTunes for about 5 hours starting around 4 PM Pacific Time on Friday.
In the statement, AVG's official spokesperson Siobhan MacDermott said: "AVG found a false alarm in the virus identification engine of some localized iTunes components (so it wasn't identifying iTunes as a virus but rather some of its localized components). The issue was resolved within the following 5 hours, and AVG sincerely apologizes to all users and customers for any inconvenience caused."
The issue of AVG's antivirus software misjudging iTunes as a virus after updating to the latest virus database was first discovered by users who posted notifications on AVG and iTunes forums. Speaking of misjudgments, AVG once also mistakenly identified the Windows system file User32.dll as a Trojan virus.