Here’s why people couldn’t access Google Docs earlier this week

Earlier this week we reported on a strange issue with Google Docs that locked lots of people out of their legitimate files for “violating the terms of service.” Google was quick to respond and fix the issue, but it has shaken faith in the cloud service as plenty of people were locked out of their documents for a while.

Now the company has published a new blog post dedicated to informing its customers exactly what happened and why. In it, Mark Risher, Google’s Director of Product Management explains that some files were mistakenly marked as containing malware or other harmful code. Google Docs went into overdrive when it misinterpreted the malware prevention code and marked some files as TOS violations.

Google publicly apologized for the gaffe, but several people who use Docs are frustrated that private content was made unavailable by such a bug.

We apologize to our users for any inconvenience this incident caused and remain committed to offering high-quality systems that keep their content safe while fully securing their files.

Did you experience this error when it happened earlier this week?