Google Docs seems to be experiencing a spate of problems right now including the text cursor being stuck in certain positions, the inability to copy and paste, unintentional text alignment and more. The culprit of these issues seems to be the popular browser extension AdBlock.

We encountered this first hand when trying to write up a quick form in Google Docs. After trying a few of our own methods to fix things we discovered that we’re not the only ones.

The Twitter account for the popular YouTube channel Comment Etiquette has written about the exact same issue:

“Has anyone else ever had an issue with google docs where the formatting gets [f****d] up, pushes the text too far to the right, doesn’t let you highlight text or place your cursor anywhere? And it’s only happening to one specific google account, on one device only. This [s**t] sucks?”

In the replies to this tweet many people have both stated that they are experiencing the same issue and that it has been solved by disabling AdBlock.

This may just be a coincidence but we’ve since read about hundreds of more people with the problem.

The tech support subreddit recently had a post about this problem. Again there are more than a hundred replies in the thread reporting the same issue.

For those who are stuck with the problem right now disabling AdBlock is rather simple: click on the red AdBlock symbol in the top right of your browser and then click on the “Always” button under “Pause on this site”. You can tell AdBlock is disabled by the fact that the logo changes to a green version displaying a thumbs up.

This is, coincidentally, the exact same way users can whitelist sites to support their content (hint hint, nudge nudge).

If you’d like to re-enable AdBlock at a later stage click on the now green logo and then on “Unpause AdBlock”.

This problem seems to be localised to AdBlock inside of Google Chrome. Google Docs still works fine for us in Brave browser which has its own ad blocking software called Shields.