Google is acknowledging a service disruption that’s currently affecting users of various products, including Google Docs, Drive, Sheets, Slides and Forms. An ongoing incident listed on the company’s Workspace Status Dashboard says that users have reported errors when trying to open files, save changes and load Drive folders.
Though the outage is not comprehensive, it is broad enough to throw a wrench into classrooms, newsrooms and startups and companies that depend on real-time collaboration. Some users can open documents but not save changes; others are encountering blank file directories or timeouts when they try sharing links.
What Google Says About the Ongoing Workspace Outage
Google confirmed the outage in a statement, and said its engineering teams were working on the issue. The company has apologized to the inordinately small number of affected customers and for now is offering no workarounds other than checking and monitoring the Workspace Status Dashboard. No ETA has been released, which is generally a good indication the underlying issue may still be under investigation.
How Far-Reaching Is the Outage Across Google Services
Crowdsourced trackers like Downdetector showed a peak of several thousand reports for Google Drive at the height of user complaints, topping out around 3,000 before tapering off. Anecdotal reports are coming in from various regions, and at this point the picture suggests a partial service degradation rather than an outright global blackout.
For many teams, the problem is not a total loss of access to files, but rather delays or glitches related to file lists loading slowly; comments and suggestions failing to sync; fields in forms not populating; text formatting options being inaccessible; and slides with drawings and charts cannot be used. In education and sales, even a temporary editing or sharing bug can doom a live session or meeting deadline.
Why These Workspace Failures Happen Across Apps
Docs, Sheets, Slides and Forms are all built upon shared backend services that include identity and auth, Drive’s metadata as well as storage layers, and an increasingly rich set of common tools: once you get these features for one app, they’re available across the other apps that Google builds. When one of these dependencies fails, symptoms can manifest across several apps even if base storage is unaffected.
Prior Google postmortems have cited changes in configuration parameters, quota exhaustion and “cascading retries” as typical contributing factors in major outages. In one well-known example, a resource quota on an authentication system caused massive access errors for multiple Google services. The lesson: If you connect parts of your cloud too tightly, they can fail in unexpected ways if one layer goes haywire.
What to Do Now While Google Works on a Fix
- Look at the Google Workspace Status Dashboard for details about the incident and resolution timeline. As an admin, subscribe to the appropriate alert feeds and ensure your team will receive updates quickly.
- Test a fresh session: open an incognito window, sign out and back in, or close and reopen the browser (but first try to temporarily disable any browser extensions that may be interfering with Drive and Docs). These steps won’t overcome a platform outage, but they eliminate the need to bother with local quirks that have nothing to do with you.
- If you have previously set up Offline mode for Docs and Drive, cached files may be viewable or editable. Desktop Drive can also expose locally synced content.
- For crucial work, use your local files or a backup office suite until service is restored. If you’re still able to open your document, save it as a .docx, .xlsx, or .pdf before the window closes.
- IT guidance: stop large Drive migrations, bulk permission changes, etc., or scripts (even demanding operations on My Drive) that could lead to throttling. Play telephone with non-Workspace sources and get a brief ready to put up once Google posts the root cause.
SLA and Business Impact for Google Workspace Users
Google Workspace markets that they provide 99.9%+ SLA for their core services, and apply service credits to paying customers if the availability falls below levels documented in their SLA terms.
Admins should log start and end times of the observed impact, collect error examples, as well as file a support case referencing this known issue after Google confirms resolution.
The good news: collaboration data in Google’s ecosystem is versioned with redundant storage, so an incident like this will more often affect availability than integrity. When Google shuts down an incident, the company typically provides a short description and — for major incidents — a postmortem that details:
- What was the cause behind the incident?
What to Watch Next as Google Restores Workspace
So expect services to come back online, rather than all at once, with the listing of Drive and ability for live collaboration to work reliably before residual sync errors disappear. If you depend on Workspace for customer-critical tasks, it makes sense to develop a simple backup plan: turn on Offline mode, establish a local export process for critical documents and create an alternate channel — even if it means using email — for speedy file sharing. These little bits and pieces massively mitigate your risk of downtime when the world’s most popular productivity suite has a bad day.