Google is dealing with a rather embarrassing bug in Google Docs today, which sees the app crash if a user types “And. And. And. And. And.”
After typing the above, hitting page refresh will pop-up the message “Unable to load file” along with a request from Google to report the error. Whether you experience the crash or not seems to depend on your browser choice, or Google may have fixed the issue by the time you are reading this. At the time of writing, Google has acknowledged it’s aware of the issue and is working to implement a fix.
In a discussion on Hacker News, other word combinations are being discovered that trigger the same Google Docs error response. For example, typing Also, Therefore, Anyway, But, Who, Why, Besides, or However with a period five times can cause it. The error seems to be related to Google’s grammar suggestion feature, with one Hacker News commenter pointing out that if you turn off “Show grammar suggestion” the crash no longer occurs.
If you’re wondering why someone would type “And.” five times in a row, it formed part of a poem and the bug was discovered by its author, Eliza Callahan. The poem, an excerpt from Callahan’s forthcoming novel From Exercises In Disbelief, can be read online.
And if this crash sounds familiar, it may be because a similar thing happened back in 2020 when a string of text started crashing iPhones, iPads, and even the Apple Watch.