Google Docs down; students affected. Blame Windows?

Google Docs has taken a tumble and isn't working as it should be. Some people are experiencing difficulty logging in, some as myself can login fine but with no access to their documents - but most are wondering why this is even the case. Users are presented with an error message bar at the top (if they can indeed access their Docs) with a link pointing to this pre-existing help page.

There are still tens of thousands of students around the world who are using Google Apps for Education, the out-sourced collaboration and email environment which rivals Microsoft's Live@edu service, which gives them integrated access to Google Docs and Gmail. This downtime means that students who are working on their finals, their last-minute essay assignments and dissertations will be locked out unless they have an offline copy.

The Apps dashboard which shows the status of Google Apps and other Google web applications shows no issues, which is not the case. A number of my student friends across the Atlantic have checked their Google Docs status and informed me that their service is down or affected in some way.

(Checked at 16:21 BST, 1st June 2010)

Whether this shows Google's denial or reluctance to disclose any weakness, or whether they are simply slow to manually update the status page, it does no good to Google's credibility when it attempts to gain more student users by winning over Microsoft-minded universities.

As Google's move towards a non-Windows environment has been in the news, one questions whether this shift in the internal network's operating systems are the potential cause for disruption. It is unlikely, I admit, but it does show an interesting paradigm with privacy and security issues.

A quick view on Twitter shows widespread issues. Some say that Blogger is down also, some seem a bit laid back as if this has happened before, and some don't even speak English but you can just tell they're not too happy. You can see more of these tweets by searching for "Google Docs"; there are plenty of them at the moment.

In short, Google blames Microsoft's weak IE6 browser for the cyber-attacks it suffered last year, so it's scrapping their entire Windows environment. Meanwhile many universities are hitting out against Google Apps for Education by stating that they cannot guarantee their students' privacy and as such, are turning to Microsoft's email service instead.

Is Google Docs down for you? Is service patchy or have you been unaffected? Would this downtime deter you away from being cloud-reliant or to another, more reliable service? Have your say.