Issues Database

In January 2021 Dropbox laid off about 315 employees — roughly 11% of its workforce — and announced the departure of its COO, framing the cuts as necessary to streamline the business even as the company was profitable and demand for remote tools was surging.

When the EU's top court struck down the EU–US Privacy Shield in 2020, Dropbox — which had self-certified under the framework — was among the US cloud services left exposed to European data-protection regulators questioning whether personal data could lawfully be transferred to the United States.

Long-running, widely reported complaints describe the Dropbox desktop client consuming excessive CPU, disk, memory, and battery — sometimes pinning processors above 100% and draining laptop batteries even when nothing is actively syncing.

Dropbox's 2019 redesign replaced its famously minimal sync-folder app with a heavy, Electron-based 'workspace' window — a Slack-like file manager that critics said abandoned the simple, reliable syncing that made Dropbox loved.

Investors who bought stock tied to Dropbox's March 2018 IPO alleged the registration statement concealed a slowdown in converting free users to paying ones; after an initial dismissal, the case settled for $1.38 million with no admission of wrongdoing.

Dropbox quietly restricted free Basic accounts to three linked devices in March 2019, a change discovered through updated help docs rather than an announcement, narrowing an already-thin 2GB free tier to push users toward paid plans.

In March 2019 Dropbox quietly capped free Basic accounts at three linked devices, a downgrade to a long-standing free tier designed to push users onto the $9.99-a-month Plus plan.

Dropbox gave Northwestern University researchers project-folder metadata covering some 16,000 scientists to study collaboration patterns. Users were never told their activity would be used for research, and academics warned the 'anonymized' data could re-identify individuals.

Four California district attorneys accused Dropbox of violating the state's Automatic Renewal Law for its Dropbox Pro subscriptions; Dropbox settled for $2.15 million and agreed to change its renewal disclosures, without admitting liability.

From 7 November 2018 Dropbox dropped sync support on Linux for every filesystem except unencrypted ext4, instantly breaking syncing for users on XFS, ZFS, ext3, Btrfs, and encrypted setups — making their data unavailable through Dropbox overnight.

Dropbox told Linux users that from November 2018 its client would sync only on unencrypted ext4, abruptly stripping support for XFS, Btrfs, ZFS, and encrypted setups — communicated as a terse desktop notification with little explanation.

Dropbox converted the long-standing Public folder into an ordinary private folder and then disabled all of its public links on 1 September 2017, breaking countless URLs people had embedded across the web with no automatic migration.