Google Explains What Caused Google Docs To Lock Out Users

You might have experienced this yesterday when trying to work on your drafts in Google Docs. An unexplained bug was locking users out of their documents and initially, it wasn’t clear what was causing this behavior. Google has now explained what was causing Google Docs to lock users out of the documents that they were trying to edit.

Quite a lot of Google Docs users experienced this yesterday. They were locked out of their drafts when trying to edit the document. Google Docs also displayed a notification warning them that the document they were trying toe dit violated the company’s terms of service.

This obviously caught a lot of people by surprise. Even those that were working on simple documents that contained nothing to violate the terms of service. Google Docs will normally serve this message if the documents contain content like malware or hate speech.

A Google spokesperson has revealed that a code push made by the company yesterday “incorrectly flagged a small percentage of Google Docs as abusive.” This caused those documents to be blocked automatically.

The company later rolled out a fix to ensure that users have full access to their documents. Google has apologized to users for the disruption and has promised to put processes in place that prevent this from happening again.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: General
Tags: Google, google docs