Google Apologizes For Mistakenly Booting Users From Google Doc

Several users found themselves suddenly locked out while using Google Docs recently for supposedly violating the company’s policies. Google has since released a statement addressing the matter, acknowledging that there were cases of files getting mistakenly flagged for breaking the rules. The company has since apologized.

Many users were locked out of Google Docs on October 31st even during writing sessions and it didn’t seem to matter what the subjects were. The affected users quickly took to Twitter to air out their grievances, which provided some insight into the situation. Most of the users were working on harmless documents, none of which remotely violated Google’s policies.

Apparently, this was due to faulty code, Engadget reports, which falsely flagged the documents. It seems the codes that were supposed to look for spam or phishing schemes thought that the affected files were exactly the targets they were looking for.

Google made a blog post that provided some more details about the incident. It also served as an acknowledgment of the company’s mistake.

“Tuesday’s bug caused the Google Docs and Drive services to misinterpret the response from these protection systems and erroneously mark some files as TOS violations, thus causing access denials for users of those files. As soon as our teams identified the problem, we removed the bug and worked to restore access to all affected files,” the post reads.

“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.”

While it’s admirable that Google can admit when it makes a mistake, this incident also highlighted the dangers of relying too much on its services. Many of the users who complained on Twitter even considered the matter to be the worst-case scenario, which eroded their trust in Google Docs by a lot.