It started with a Google Photos support thread that cropped up over the weekend from a user complaining about “water-stained” photos.
Eventually, more users chimed in with their experience of seeing corrupted images on Google Photos.
“Just been looking through anniversary photos, on Google photos, from 8 years ago and many images are shown as corrupted,” writes a user in another thread.
For funsies, I tried downloading a handful of images from 2014 that I long ago uploaded to Google Photos.
Google responded when I asked if the issue was on its radar by confirming that it is aware of the problem and is “rolling out a fix.” This bug does not impact original photos stored in Google Photos, though you might encounter it when downloading images or viewing them on iOS, Android, and the browser.