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Google Docs just ate your homework

Google says a Wednesday outage has been resolved. Guess you'll have to stop binge-watching and get back to that essay instead.

Edward Moyer Senior Editor
Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.
Credentials
  • Ed was a member of the CNET crew that won a National Magazine Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors for general excellence online. He's also edited pieces that've nabbed prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists and others.
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Edward Moyer
2 min read

I was going to write this post using Google Docs, but all I got was a "Trying to connect" alert.

I wasn't alone in being shut out. Twitter lit up Wednesday afternoon with tweets from various frustrated word slingers pulling their hair out over the outage.

Website DownDetector.com said Docs had been having issues since about 9 a.m. PT, and the site's live outage map showed that a number of major metropolitan areas in the US had been affected.

docs-down-map
DownDetector.com

And like Twitter, DownDetector's comment section was rife with complaints.

"Well this is pissing me off," read one. "I can see what's in my drive, but it won't open any of the documents, unless i have a Chrome offline version."

"502. That's an error," read another. "'The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds.' That's all we know."

Google confirmed the situation at 12:48 p.m. PT with a post on its G Suite status dashboard and said it would provide more info shortly: "We're aware of a problem with Google Docs affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Docs."

At 1:55 p.m., it said some folks had regained access and that a larger fix would be in place soon: "Google Docs service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future."

And at 2:10, Google said the issue was 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."

It's not the first time an outage has jeopardized your chance of achieving immortality with a prize-winning essay. September and January also saw issues. Some users got locked out of documents in October as well.

Not all the tweets Wednesday were stress-inducing. A few offered a smile to help you get past the pain. Here's one:

First published Nov. 15 at 2:12 p.m. PT.
Updated at 2:22 p.m. PT: Adds Google's update that the issue with Docs has been resolved. 

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