Google Apps users in a tizzy as Docs, Drive go into a tailspin
Google Apps endured a major outage on Friday afternoon, sending many users into a tizzy over trying to finish work before the weekend -- or simply just go home and start the weekend early.
Specifically, the apps suffering service disruptions were Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Classroom and the Realtime reporting API.
Basically, the core of Google's cloud app portfolio designed for productivity became completely unproductive.
The Mountain View, Calif.-headquartered corporation has confirmed outages plaguing certain apps through the Google Apps Status Dashboard as well as via Twitter.
We know something's up with Drive for the moment. Rest assured, we're on it and we'll update soon.
-- Google Drive (@googledrive) 9 Octobre 2015
Google first posted just before noon PT on Friday that it was investigating reports of issues with these apps.
The Internet giant followed up with a second notice at 1:10 PT that the investigation was ongoing, and it would provide a subsequent update within an hour.
Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by 10/9/15, 2:10 PM with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience.
As of 2:30PM, Google assured that these problems had been resolved, although no cause for the outage had been provided.
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.
ZDNet has reached out to Google for further comment.
Google isn't the only one trying the patience of billions of Internet users subscribing to the cloud-based platform for both work and personal content.
Facebook recently suffered a string of outages in September. The social network later attributed the downtimes to planned software updates gone wrong.
UPDATE: A Google spokesperson provided the following response.
Google Drive, Docs editors and Classroom have been restored for 99.5% of affected users as of 1:01 PM Pacific, and for the remaining 0.5% of users by 2:10 PM Pacific. During the event, our top priority was to restore service. We are now turning our attention to understanding what caused the outage; our preliminary diagnosis is that this was caused by a code push which behaved differently in widespread use than it had during testing. If you were affected, we apologize for the disruption this caused. We are calculating the impact to our business customers and will issue SLA credits as appropriate. Full details will follow in our incident report.
Screenshot via Google Apps Status Dashboard (2:30PM PT 10/09/15)