Take an extended coffee break this morning, because that work is not getting done. Google Drive, home to Google’s suite of online office tools for documents, spreadsheets, presentations, forms and more, is experiencing an extended outage this morning which sees some users unable to access the service, while others are seeing slowness or latency issues, Google reports.
Not everyone seems to be affected, however. Case in point: I’m able to personally access Drive and view files at fairly good speeds. But there are a number of reports on social media, and Google has also confirmed the existence of the problem, now under investigation, via its Google Apps Status page.
Here, the issue is flagged as a “service disruption,” not “outage,” as the issue isn’t universal, nor entirely down. However, Google did say that some affected users are receiving 500 errors when accessing Drive, which means the service is having trouble loading at all for at least some users. (Looks like users are specifically seeing error 502, according to Twitter.)
Google drive is down. WTF! Should never happen. pic.twitter.com/l5nQ0X4gr0
— philbus (@philbus) June 4, 2014
.@GoogleDrive has been down or degraded for the past 20 minutes it seems. pic.twitter.com/1ko4fFgqcd
— Andrew Kadi (@imAK48) June 4, 2014
Oh noes, looks like @googledrive is down at the moment! Can’t access it from my PC :( #down #fail pic.twitter.com/diveDHeGsY
— Jacqui Read (@tekiegirl) June 4, 2014
The outage was first reported as being investigated by the company at 10:32 AM ET. An update at 11:13 AM ET confirmed the issue. Google says its next update on the issue will arrive at 12:30 PM ET today, which you can check for here.
Google’s cloud services are generally reliable, but like many online services, they do experience outages from time to time. This year, Gmail and Google+ crashed in January, Google Hangouts and Gmail had issues in March, and, before that, last fall, Gmail had a lengthy slowdown where mail was not being delivered.
Update: A new message on the App Status page says the service has been partially restored.
Update 2: 12:29 PM ET: From Google: “The problem with Google Drive should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.”