Google Docs decided it was time for everyone to throw in the towel on this Friday workday a few hours early after it started experiencing difficulties in the afternoon, locking many users out.
It’s still unclear what is going on with the service, although a Google spokesperson told us “We’re investigating now,” and promised an update by 5:10 PM ET.
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Meanwhile, it’s becoming clear just how many people depend on Google Docs for work. Hope you saved your work in the CMS!
As of now, the service is still spotty, but we will update this story if we get any word from Google.
Update, 5:23 PM: According to Google’s status board, “Google Drive service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.”
Google also sent a statement by email at 6:22 PM:
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.
