Posted in Poor Quality Assurance

Google bricks its customers’ own devices with typo-plagued update

Mega oops:

Google says it has fixed a major Chrome OS bug that locked users out of their devices. Google’s bulletin says that Chrome OS version 91.0.4472.165, which was briefly available this week, renders users unable to log in to their devices, essentially bricking them.

Chrome OS automatically downloads updates and switches to the new version after a reboot, so users who reboot their devices are suddenly locked out them. The go-to advice while this broken update is out there is to not reboot.

“ChromeOS is open source, so we can get a bit more detail about the fix thanks to Android Police hunting down a Reddit comment from user elitist_ferret. The problem apparently boils down to a single-character typo,” the article goes on to say.

 There’s really no excuse for this kind of slipup considering that “Chrome OS” is software that obeys Google rather than the end user. It is specifically programmed to auto-update, as mentioned above. That means updates needs to not contain typos. Preventing all bugs is not possible in any software, but checking for typos is part of basic quality assurance.