A privacy glitch causing files on Google Docs to be made accessible to people other than those they were shared with, has been fixed, the search engine giant revealed in a blog post.

In their defense, Google said the bug, which they claim has already been identified and fixed during the weekend, affected only a very small number of users.

According to Google, fewer than .05 percent of Google Docs documents were affected by the privacy breach and the "inadvertent sharing" of files was limited to "people with whom the document owner, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document."

Google also went on to say that the security bug affected so few users because it "only could have occurred for a very small percentage of documents, and for those documents only when a specific sequence of user actions took place."

Google Spreadsheets were not affected. As part of the fix, Google used an automated process to remove collaborators and viewers from the documents identified as having been affected. The company then e-mailed the document owners to point them to their affected documents in case they wanted to share them again.

"We're sorry for the trouble this has caused," Docs product manager Jennifer Mazzon continued. "We understand our users' concerns (in fact, we were affected by this bug ourselves) and we're treating this very seriously. We hope this explanation provides greater clarity."