Google has confirmed that they made a mistake that made some documents that were supposed to be private, shared. Reported at TechCrunch the error affected less than 0.05% of documents.

Given the scale of the Google Docs business, this represents a significant slip up.  According to Compete, 4.4 million unique users visited Google Docs in September, 2008. As estimated by Garett Rogers at zdnet, if each of those people created only one document in Google docs in their life that would actually mean somewhere around 220,000 documents affected.

Google's spokeperson said:

 

We fixed the bug, which affected less than 0.05% of documents, and removed any collaborators. We also contacted the users who were affected to notify them of the bug and to identify which of their documents may have been affected. We have extensive safeguards in place to protect all documents, and are confident this was an isolated incident.

This puts focus on the question of trust, which is one of the major challenges for cloud computing.  When you engage in cloud services you give away an element of control.  Security and stability, become key issues, not to mention challenges from infrastructure issues, which even if robust and reliable, isn’t in your control either. Without advance planning, by the time you are affected by an outage, there is little you can do.

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