The Pac-Man Google Doodle was not properly optimized for Firefox users, which led to the Pac-Man sound effects playing in sequence unprompted, even if Google was on a different tab, with many users mistaking the ghosts' movement noises for cartoon police sirens and believing to have caught a virus.

So many questions were posted on Mozilla's Q&A forums that, once they prepared an article to explain the Pac-Man glitch, the company's database server had slowed down to a point where the article took long to upload.

When Pac-Man Doodle was released, Maurice Molyneaux, who was the certification authority for Pac-Man ports at the time, was angry as he was not informed of its existence by Namco Networks' marketing group, who developed the game. Molyneaux has stated that had he been informed of the game prior to release, he would have made minor modifications to the maze layout.

When Google launched their 2010 Pac-Man anniversary Doodle, the popularity of it was estimated to have cost 4,819,352 man hours and $120,483,800 in productivity.