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A strange bug made its way into Google Docs late last week. The platform would automatically crash whenever it saw the string of words “And. And. And. And. And.” Yea, pretty strange, right?
The bug was originally brought to the light on the Google Docs Editors Help forum by user Pat Needham. Needham explained that the bug was case-sensitive and required all of the “And’s” to be capitalized.
Users on the forum further confirmed the bug, adding that the issue also happens with other similar combinations of words. For instance, “But. But. But. But. But.” would return the same crash results, along with several other words formatted in the same way.
One user eventually identified that a Google Docs setting was causing the issue. It was the “Show grammar suggestion” tool that helps you keep your grammar in check when you’re typing that was the root cause of this issue.
Evidently, turning that feature off would save you from the headache of this bug. But getting back into your paper was another story. The bug would constantly crash your paper after the first time, making it near impossible to get back in.
Bleeping Computer was able to recreate the issue last week and even found a potential workaround. If you run into this bug, you could open Google Docs on your mobile device and delete the string of words causing the issue. Then, you could open the document on your computer without worrying about a crash.
But fortunately, you shouldn’t have to worry about that anymore. Google was able to push a fix for this bug late last week that should prevent it from happening again. You should be able to get back into your articles that ran into this unique bug without crashing again.
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