Google Docs Was Down Briefly Yesterday And People Lost Their Minds

Google Docs has become the go to for many people in the business and personal world for collaborating on documents in the cloud. Normally you hit the Docs icon and start writing or open your saved documents in Drive and off you go. Yesterday, however, Google Docs was down, and people lost their minds. Reports indicate when people in affected areas tried to open a document all they saw was a "Trying to connect" alert.

DownDetector.com offered up a handy little map that showed areas that were hit with the outage. According to that site Docs began having issues Wednesday at about 9 am PT. The areas hardest hit appeared to be on the east and west coasts, but many major metro areas were down across the States.

According to some of the comments left on the DownDetector comment section about the outage, you could still open Chrome offline versions of your documents. However, if you didn't save an offline version you were out of luck. One user wrote in the comments, "Well this is pissing me off. I can see what's in my drive, but it won't open any of the documents, unless I have a Chrome offline version."

Google stepped in at about 12:48 pm PT and stated on the G Suite status dashboard that it would have more details shortly. Google wrote, "We're aware of a problem with Google Docs affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Docs."

The next update by Google came at 1:55 pm PT and by then some users had access restored and Google promised a fix for all users shortly. Google wrote, "Google Docs service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future."

Google finally had the issue resolved by 2:10 pm PT, but didn't say what caused the outage. Google issued the following statement:

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.