Google Drive Service Restored, Company Says

Google's AppStatus dashboard initially reported the malfunction at 7:17 a.m. Eastern time, noting that the company had received reports of the service interruption that was in the process of being investigated. Approximately one hour later, the company acknowledged access issues involving what was described as "a significant subset of users."

At 11:55 a.m. Eastern time, the company reported that service restoration was under way, and that some users had already been restored.

Less than an hour later, the company announced full service had been restored, and issued an apology for the outage. No further explanation was given regarding the source of the problem.

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Comments on Twitter suggested that the outage impacted large numbers of users, but a few people reported that their service continued uninterrupted. In some cases, access continued but was dramatically slower than the speed with which the users are typically familiar.

Google Drive is a widely used storage service supporting a variety of media, including documents, photographs, videos, audio files, etc. The service, which was rolled out last year as an alternative to DropBox, is highly popular in the consumer space, but is also in use by a number of businesses, on either an authorized or unauthorized basis.

PUBLISHED MARCH 18