You Can Blame a Typo for Locking You Out of Your Chromebook.

An extra Ampersand killed the ability for some users to log into their Chrome OS devices.

Typos can be pretty embarrassing, but in the case of a recent Chromebook bug, they can also lock you out of your laptop.

A major bug in a recent Chrome OS release (91.0.4472.147) left some users bricked out of their Chromebooks. Reddit, in due course, has already spotted the issue.

As some eagle-eyed users, including one “elitist_ferret” (first spotted by Android Police), have pointed out, the problem appears to boil down to a missing ampersand in Google’s code.

Google forgot to add an ampersand to a conditional statement, which prevented Chrome OS from decrypting your login information to get past the lock screen. Even if you were entering the right password, there was no way for Google to verify it.

Google provides some instructions on what to do if your system gets bit by the bug:

A new version which will fix the issue will be available on July 21st, but in the meantime these are the options if you are affected:

1. Once the new 91 update is available on Wednesday, users will get the new version via auto-update or they can use guest mode to trigger the OS update.

2. Powerwash the device (local data will be cleared).

3. Rollback the Chrome OS device to a previous version via USB (local data will be cleared).

Once the updated version is available you will need to do one of the following steps:

- Leave the Chromebook device on the login screen to download the update via auto-update.

- Update the device manually after logging into Guest Mode We apologize for the inconvenience.