Google Drive for Work Suffers Outage

Some Google Drive for Work customers and partners experienced downtime—or at least performance issues—on Oct. 15 for up to four hours.

The Google Apps Status Dashboard first notified readers of the problem by indicating the Google Drive for Work team was “investigating reports of an issue with the Admin console.”

An hour later, the team provided the following update to users: “Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by 10/9/14 7:11 PM with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience. Please note that the Google Admin app for Android and iOS will still work as normal, and can be used to perform some tasks while the Admin console is unavailable.”

It was approximately four hours after the initial Apps Dashboard report that the team indicated that service had been fully restored.

“The problem with Admin console should be 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,” the team wrote.

Google (GOOG) didn’t indicate what had caused the problem, but several users experienced problems (including yours truly). The service was in a state of disruption that caused significant lag time in loading documents—or simply the inability to bring up Drive files.

This is the first real issue Google Drive for Work has had since the name change. It certainly caused some inconvience and frustration among the Drive user base, but the general availability of the cloud service—and cloud services in general—fare well, even when compared to on-premise IT services.