Yesterday (Wednesday) Google Docs was down for a little over an hour for what Google says was a “significant subset of users.” Think about all the hundreds of millions of people who use the G Suite Word processor. That is a significant subset of users as Google tries to downplay it, it is still a massive number of people across the globe.
The good thing was the outage was only limited to the Google Docs, other services of G Suite and Drive were functioning as normal. Though the people who were able to access Docs, they seem to work without any problems.
For those of u3s unlucky G Suite users who were unlucky, we were locked out of Docs starting a little after 4 PM ET to a little after 5 PM ET. The little over an hour outage of Docs made headlines and is very surprising given Google is the type of company known to have services with downtimes. It is a rare occurrence, thus the current fuss about it online.
Users affected most are perhaps those in the U.S. as the downtime occurred right in the middle of work and school day. You might have been lucky if you lived in a different time zone where people were either going to sleep, waking up, or going home in the evening.
The first acknowledgment of the problem came at about 3:48 PM ET, with the company saying it is “aware of the problem” and that some users are “unable to access Google Docs.”
One hour later, Google further said the problem persists for some users, and at 5:10 PM ET, the company assured the users the issue had been handled.
“We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.”
