Google accidentally locked people out of Docs files

Ever since I've first heard about the concept of the cloud, about 20 years ago, I've been far from keen on hosting personal or work data in the cloud. While there's nothing wrong with storing copies in the cloud as a backup, the whole notion of putting important files only in the cloud is not that smart in my opinion.

Folks around the world got another reminder about the dangers of the cloud yesterday, as a code screwup from a Google engineer temporarily locked users out of documents stored on their Google Drive.

Outrage erupted on Twitter yesterday evening as various authors reported that documents they were working on were no longer accessible because of a violation of Google's Terms of Service.

Several hours ago, Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of Jacobin magazine, via Twitter said an article on Eastern Europe's post-socialist policies had vanished from his Google Drive space due to a terms of service (ToS) violation.

Rachel Bale, a reporter for National Geographic, said a draft of a story about wildlife crime had been frozen for a ToS violation.

And Jason Heppler, an assistant professor of history at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, posted a screenshot showing that a requested file had been deleted from Google Drive.

Has anyone had @googledocs lock you out of a doc before? My draft of a story about wildlife crime was just frozen for violating their TOS.

— Rachael Bale (@Rachael_Bale) October 31, 2017

Tfw your finalizing a piece on E. Europe post-socialist parties in Google Drive and Google removes it because it's in violation of its ToS??

— Bhaskar Sunkara (@sunraysunray) October 31, 2017

The search giant claims the issues were caused by a code update that accidentally flagged a small percentage of Google Docs as abusive. Google fixed the issue and says all users should now have full access to their docs.