If you were one of the Google Drive users that were inadvertently and apparently mistakenly prevented from accessing your files last Tuesday, that must have been one frustrating day for you. And now Google wants to explain what happened, and apparently, a “short-lived bug” was to blame. They also took the opportunity to say that protections like this are automated for the good of the users, but they were taking steps to ensure that a mistake like that will never happen again.
What happened was that a bug mistakenly flagged some files as violating their terms of service (TOS). And the automatic protocol for Google then is to block access to these files that have been flagged. Google Docs and Drive misinterpreted the response from the protection systems and those files that were marked as TOS violations, were of course not accessible even if there was probably nothing wrong with them except that they were in the random path of a bug.
And so some users were bewildered as to why they were not able to open their files on Tuesday morning. Even worse, some were locked out of their own files while they were in the middle of editing their Google Docs. But as soon as the complaints started coming in, the teams identified the problem and they then removed the bug and worked on restoring the files.
Google also explained that there is no human intervention when it comes to virus and malware scanning and unfortunately, this huge mistake happened. They did say they are committed to not just secure your files upload to the cloud but keep all of them safe, sometimes, apparently, even from you. Hopefully, they come up with a solution so there will be no repeat performance.
SOURCE: Google
