Chrome blocking and marking digital downloads as dangerous

Thanks for the update @paul2009 - glad to hear you're also able to download from Chrome without warnings now. Hoping to hear the same from others soon!

I just got the following response from "Angie" from Squarespace:

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My name is Angie and I’m a Team Lead here at Squarespace. Thank you so much for your patience while I took some additional time to review your escalated ticket. As Rory promised, your case has been assigned to me and I will be taking ownership of this moving forward.
 
I had a chance to closely read through your chat transcript, and can see that you were requesting an update on an ongoing issue with Chrome blocking ZIP files.
 
After reviewing documentation, I can see that there have been no updates and/or other workarounds provided.
 
While none of our documentation has been updated. I know from a post on Squarespace forum that someone was able to successfully download a ZIP file without a warning roughly 10 hours ago. Have you had any downloads today that were successful, as well? 
 
If not, at this time I can assure your our engineering team is aware of this issue and we hope to see this resolved in time. 

So, she is referencing the recent posts in this thread to let me know that, even though there is no documentation to support it, she thinks the issue might be resolved due to this "anecdotal evidence".

I've generated re-freshed links for some of my customers who reported this issue recently, and reached out to them to ask them to try their downloads again WITHOUT disabling the "safe browsing" setting in Chrome.   Waiting to hear back from them as to how it is working now.

Fingers crossed ... and breath held!  😉

Still working on this end! @Tull you can test this yourself by creating a 100% off discount code and then using that to try your own downloads at no cost.

I just tested and was able to successfully download in Chrome. Yay!

I have just tested today, and did not get the "malicious file" message. Is the issue fixed? It would be awesome if this is the case, can everyone report if they are getting the message or not? I think a good test would be to do several downloads the same day and see if it triggers Chrome at some point.

Looking promising!

I've heard back from my customers who re-tried their downloads today, and they worked!   I also took MFA's advice and tried a zip download with Chrome myself, and had no issues.

Of course, I'd feel better if someone from Squarespace would confirm that they actually found/fixed something.   I'll probably leave the information about the issue in my outgoing emails to digital product customers for the time being.   But it's definitely looking good!

Just got another response back from the "Product Specialist" assigned to my ticket.  

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Angie S. (Squarespace)

Sep 27, 2023, 4:10 PM EDT

Hi Tull,
 
Thank you for your prompt response. I'm glad to hear that it worked this time. After touching base with the engineering team they are also aware of the fix. Customers who previously had this issue are also saying its working now so it seems the fix put into place has worked for everyone.  
 
Thank you for continuing to reach out about this error and your candid feedback. Please let me know if you need anything else. 

So, all's well that ends well, and "case closed".

Whew!  😉

Thanks to everyone who persisted with Squarespace on this issue and got it fixed for all of us. Thank you!

Bad news everyone: unfortunately the issue has re-appeared and Chrome is once again producing dangerous download warnings - on our site at least. Anybody else?

Hi All - I can confirm that yet again our digital product website is producing warnings from Chrome (latest build v. 117.0.5938.132). The warnings went away for about a week but now they are back.

Sorry to hear that. Hey Squarespace, @paul2009 - what's the deal? Why have these warnings returned??

I've also had the blocked download issue return and heard from a customer again this week. 

Squarespace - this thread is not closed! Please give your loyal customers a status report on this issue.

We had numerous buyers have this issue yesterday.  I've talked to Squarespace twice in the last 24 hours and they did not provide ANY assistance on this issue at all.  It's extremely disappointing and they are NOT doing anything to fix the issue.  

What's more maddening is that while my support thread has been escalated to engineers who claim to be "actively investigating the issue", I have evidence that other Squarespace customers are still being served the same initial gas-lighting load of crap about it being an issue with their file content, with garbage suggestions like "Why don't you just use a single PDF?", etc.

This is shameful behavior. How can your company admit there is an issue being investigated on the one hand, but then still serve demonstrably false and long-since disproven nonsense to other customers? Please, at the very least: align your messaging, admit there is an issue that is being worked on at all levels - and stop lying to your customers with hurtful, time-wasting nonsense.

Meanwhile, adding insult to injury by triumphantly touting your big "Refresh"... how about you "Refresh" your ability to serve digital downloads correctly and treat your customers with respect?

Well, the warnings seem to have temporarily disappeared again - I say temporarily because this happened a couple weeks back for about one week before they reappeared again.

I think it's safe to say the patience of everyone on this thread has been severely tested by Squarespace on this issue, and if you expect us to continue waiting for a long-term fix, we all deserve a thorough engineering update to better understand the situation.

Please tell us in detail what's going on, how the issue is being approached, what, if anything, changed on your end - and when you expect the issue to be resolved on a long-term basis.

12 hours ago, MFA said:

we all deserve a thorough engineering update to better understand the situation.

Please see item seven on the forum guidelines.

Yesterday I followed up on my ongoing support thread for a status report and received a reply almost instantly with the same boilerplate nonsense from two months ago about it all being our fault and also Google's fault but definitely not Squarespace's fault and there's nothing they can do so why don't we just serve our products (impossibly) as a single PDF? Etc. etc.

Thankfully I was able to get it escalated back to the senior support team, who today provided the following update on this issue:

Thanks for reaching out again.
 
I just wanted to confirm that our Engineering teams have been actively working with Google's technical teams regarding this behavior.
 
My apologies about the back and forth here - the issue is fairly complex and requires action on Google's end to fully address the issue. As a result, we're not able to provide a specific timeframe for resolution. However, we will contact you via email as soon as there are any updates.

Squarespace folks, please update the default support boilerplate on this issue to better support your loyal customers! There's no excuse to continue gas-lighting them with such nonsense. Why not just say you're aware of the issue, deeply regret any inconvenience, and are currently working to resolve it? It shouldn't be so difficult.

4 minutes ago, MFA said:

I just wanted to confirm that our Engineering teams have been actively working with Google's technical teams regarding this behavior.
 
My apologies about the back and forth here - the issue is fairly complex and requires action on Google's end to fully address the issue.

I appreciate how frustrating this has been for everyone concerned but this issue should now be resolved for all Squarespace Download Products.

As your email indicated, Google's technical teams applied a temporary fix for this issue earlier this week, restoring the download feature and preventing incorrect warning messages appearing. A permanent fix will be applied soon but they don't expect us (or our customers) to experience further issues. To be clear, this issue was not caused by Squarespace and was not an issue with their platform.

Many thanks for this update @paul2009 - our digital files are downloading properly. Here's hoping Google's permanent fix gets patched smoothly with no further issues!! 🤞🤞

Thanks to everyone on here who kept on this. I was away for 6 weeks and having to send files on wetransfer when my site didn't work. Here's hoping this sticks!

Has this issue appeared again? Chrome seems to be blocking the PDF download on one of my sites...