Typing certain words five times caused Google Docs to crash

In a nutshell: If, for some unknown reason, you recently decided to type the same word five times in a Google Docs document and found it crashed the app, don’t worry—you’re not alone. A strange bug that Google has now fixed is to blame for everything.

User Pat Needham posted on Google support pages (through ZDNet) that writing the text string “A.A.A.A.I.” The application crashed on the Docs page in Chrome. He confirmed that it is present in Docs on his personal, G Suite Basic, and work account, and other users have said that it is also present in Firefox.

The issue was discussed on Hacker Newswhich led to speculation that it might have something to do with the programming language, or perhaps just a bug in the code.

People then proceeded to search for other words that would also cause Google Docs to crash when typed five times with a dot between each word. Some of those found included “Therefore”, “Doesn’t care”, “But”, “Who”, “Why”, “Besides”, “However”, “Expensive”, “Although”, “Besides”, and “Besides “.

One user wanted to do a thorough search for trigger words, so he started going through the entire dictionary in batches of 500 words. They found that Firstly, Secondly, Thirdly, and Fourthly caused an error, but oddly enough, Fifthly and any words above it (i.e. sixthly, seventhly, etc.) had no effect.

It didn’t take long for Google to respond to a post on their support page and confirm they were working on a fix. We can assume that this problem was not too difficult to solve, since the quirk seems to have disappeared. What caused it has not yet been reported.

Image credit: XanderSt