On October 31, Google mistakenly blocked access to Drives and Docs for some of the users, due to a short-lived bug. This bug incorrectly pointed out certain files as offensive to the Google Terms and Services.
The blocking gave rise to some questions, and today, Google addressed the same via a blog of Mark Risher, the Director of Project Management for the company.
Firstly, the Docs and Drive products have unmatched preventive security measures that work automatically. These measures are placed for protecting users from spam, malware, and phishing – while using dynamic and static antivirus techniques.
Now, malware and virus scanning is an industry-wide practice, performing automated comparisons among known indicators and samples. This process does not include human intervention.
The bug of Tuesday misinterpreted the response from the aforementioned systems and marked certain files for TOS violations. This created access denials for Drives and Docs for the users. Google has presently identified the issue and has removed the bug as well. The search giant took one step ahead and worked on the affected files to restore accessibility.
Google apologizes to the users for the inconvenience caused by the short-term issue. Often, the tech firm removes ‘access to certain files’ to provide protection to its users. Google considers protecting users’ central’ in terms of cyber-safety.
