For the past day or so, countless Google Docs and Google Drive users have reported a slew of formatting hiccups that rendered writing tools unusable. Cursors would freeze, highlighting wouldn’t work, and any text typed looked like utter shit. And now we have a culprit. On Wednesday, Google Drive product manager Remy Burger confirmed that it wasn’t the company’s fault, but people’s ad blockers.
Specifically, Burger pointed to a recent update made by the team behind the AdBlock Plus browser extension and the way it works with EasyList — the tech powering the list of sites that AdBlock and other extensions use to… block ads. AdBlock later confirmed the issue on Twitter, saying that the problem stemmed from an update to the primary filter list powering its app and that the list’s authors were working to patch the issue.
For now, the easiest way to get your slides and sheets running again is just disabling your ad blocker. If you’re (understandably) not into that idea, AdBlock offered another workaround: click into the extension’s menu, find the filter list tab, and update them manually. You can also try adding the Google Docs site address directly into the extension’s list of whitelisted sites.