Today’s tech news was dominated by f8, Facebook’s developer conference where the social network outlined some new features that may help it become the underlying social fabric of the web. One of the day’s announcements was that Facebook and Microsoft had teamed up to launch Docs.com, an online version of Microsoft Office that has extra access to Facebook data to make the site “instantly social”. And the site’s biggest competitor — Google Docs — has responded to the news by going down. Hard. Update: Google’s status dashboard now says that everything should be working properly.

Over the course of the last hour, we’ve gotten many tips reporting Google Docs issues. I’m unable to create a spreadsheet. And Twitter search yields countless matches of people complaining about the outage.

Google updated its Apps Status Dashboard an hour ago to say it was an aware of an issue with Google Docs List. They updated it again minutes ago. As it turns out, Lists isn’t what is being affected — it’s Spreadsheets, Drawings, and Documents. Fortunately, there’s a way to fix the issue: Google says the problem is only affecting users on the recently released preview version of Google Docs — switch it back to the old version using the option at the top of the screen and things should start working again. Here’s the latest status update:

Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by April 21, 2010 6:36:00 PM UTC-7 with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience.
The problem we detected does not affect Google Docs List. Instead, impacted users cannot access Spreadsheets, Presentations, Drawings, and Documents created in the new preview version.
Google Documents users can still access and edit documents created in the standard version and those using the preview version can switch to the standard version to create new documents.

Crunchbase

• GOOGLE DOCS

Product: Google Docs

Website: docs.google.com

Company Google

Google Docs is Google’s free web-based word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application. The online app allows users to easily share documents and collaboratively work on them in real-time. On March 31st, 2008, the Google Docs team announced integration with Google Gears, allowing users to edit their documents offline.

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