Another Cloud Goes Down: Google Drive Experiences Outage

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On Monday, Google noted that “a significant subset of users” were experiencing trouble when accessing the Google Drive cloud storage service. This is just the latest in a series of high-profile outages that have plagued cloud computing vendors.

InformationWeek’s Eric Zeman reported, “Google admitted Monday morning that its cloud-based Google Drive service is experiencing a service disruption. According to a statement made on Google’s service dashboard, ‘We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Drive. We will provide more information shortly.'”

Ubergizmo’s Daniel Perez observed, “Fortunately, it seems the outages are intermittent and won’t affect all Google Drive users at this time, but a number of users are reporting being unable to access particular folders, while at the same time, being able to access other folders without experiencing any issues at all. Some other users are having completely no issues with their Google Drive, but instead are having issues signing in with their Google Apps account. The last of the users aren’t even able to access Google Drive entirely as they get a ‘502 error’ for an extended period of time.”

CNET quoted Google’s status page, which said, “We’re aware of a problem with Google Drive affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Drive. We will provide an update by 3/18/13 12:10 PM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.”

ReadWrite’s Mark Hachman noted, “Although we often talk about the cloud in idealized terms, the fact is that cloud services do fail, and when they do, they often fail in a very high-profile manner. The world’s largest cloud service, Facebook, stumbled in early January, and last week, Microsoft suffered an outage to Hotmail.com and its complementary Outlook.com service, which last week it blamed on an overheating datacenter. In 2011, RIM’s BlackBerry email service was down for days, and outages at Amazon’s cloud services have taken down customers including Netflix and others. (Of course, it’s also true that in-house services also fail, they just tend to make fewer headlines.)”