Dropbox keeps your files. This is the record of when it failed to.
Dropbox Watchdog is a critical, well-sourced archive of the company's documented failures — security breaches, privacy walk-backs, lawsuits, outages and data loss, killed products, and pricing controversies from 2010 to 2026. Every entry is backed by primary sources; Dropbox's own responses are included wherever they exist.
Rigorously sourced
Primary sources first — news reporting, security disclosures, court records, and Dropbox's own statements and blog posts. No claim without a citation.
Critical, not neutral
Structured, searchable, and unflinching. We call out the breaches, broken promises, and growth-over-users decisions directly — and keep every claim verifiable.
Fair to the facts
We document problems factually and include Dropbox's responses and context. Legal claims distinguish allegations from settlements and judgments.
Who writes this and how entries are sourced and corrected: about Dropbox Watchdog.
New and updated
The trackers
Start with the flagship entries
The incidents the archive ranks as most consequential — the full ranking and the reasoning behind it is on the worst incidents page.
- The 2012 breach: 68 million user credentials stolen via a reused password
- The 2011 authentication bug: any password unlocked any account
- Dropbox holds the keys: the design choice behind every privacy controversy
- The 2024 Dropbox Sign breach: e-signature data exposed
- The 2014 Selective Sync bug that permanently deleted users' files
- The 2014 shared-link leak: 'private' documents exposed via referer headers and search
- Blocked behind the Great Firewall: Dropbox in China since 2014
Questions people ask about Dropbox
The most serious documented issues
Documented issues by year
The archive tracks how Dropbox's problems cluster over time — around major breaches, product shutdowns, pricing changes, and restructurings. Explore the full set of visualizations on the data page.
See all charts