Unbeknownst to many, Google Drive suffered a pretty major outage earlier today that affected large swaths of users. Their downtime left users unable to create or access cloud documents for the better part of 2 hours. For companies, students and individuals who leverage Google’s cloud storage service as a main part of their workflow, this is clearly a pretty big issue.

According to Down Detector, the problems began around 12:40pm EST for large areas of the US and continued plaguing users for a solid two hours. The issues seemed largely to involve the lack of app response and not file management problems, but that could have simply been a problem of perception. We were not affected here at our office in any way that caused us to become aware of the issue on our own, so I can’t attest to what exactly was broken, but most user complaints were in regards to apps not loading as opposed to files not syncing according to Down Detector.

In response, Google pointed users and news outlets to the Google Drive Status Dashboard for updates, and the good news is the problem went from identified to solved and cleared up in a matter of minutes. Check out the timeline below.

At 1:30pm EST, Google made a note that Drive was officially having an outage and in about 16 minutes, things were restored back to normal. Clearly, this impacted many users across the country as it quickly became a huge trend on Twitter. Both Google Drive and Google Docs had tens of thousands of tweets on Twitter over the course of a few hours and, not surprisingly, many were a bit dismayed over the outage. Good on Google for seeing the issue, acknowledging it, and fixing it in short order. In an age where we rely on massive servers to get the majority of our work done, it is good to see that when – not if – problems arise, they can be fixed quite quickly.

SOURCE: CNET