Google Docs momentarily goes down

Google Docs momentarily went down Wednesday afternoon, locking users out of their files.

Other Google products like Gmail and Google Drive did not appear to be affected by the outage.

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“Docs is back up for most users, and we expect a full resolution for all users shortly. Sorry for this disruption and thanks again for your patience with us,” the company tweeted from its Google Docs account on Wednesday.  

Docs is back up for most users, and we expect a full resolution for all users shortly. Sorry for this disruption and thanks again for your patience with us.

— Google Docs (@googledocs) November 15, 2017

Google tweeted almost an hour earlier that it was “actively investigating an issue with Docs not loading.”

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The company has not yet said what caused the glitch.

Two weeks ago, many Google Docs users were also locked out of their documents and greeted with a message saying that they had violated Google’s terms of service.

The company said it “made a code push that incorrectly flagged a small percentage of Google Docs as abusive, which caused those documents to be automatically blocked.”

The glitch raised concerns over Google’s monitoring of users’ documents.

Google responded to privacy concerns about it potentially monitoring emails by saying that it does not read users’ files, but instead scans them for patterns that indicate abuse.

According to The Washington Post, who spoke with Google on the matter, the scan does not assess a document’s meaning but simply looks for behavior that would indicate a violation.