Google Drive Faces Outage, Users Report [Update] (google.com)

Numerous Slashdot readers are reporting that they are facing issues access Google Drive, the productivity suite from the Mountain View-based company. Google's dashboard confirms that Drive is facing outage. Third-party web monitoring tool DownDetector also reports thousands of similar complaints from users. The company said, "Google Drive service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change. Google Drive is not loading files and results in a failures for a subset of users."

Update: 09/07 17:13 GMT: Google says it has resolved the issue.

Comments

Awww

[Tablizer]

Google's having a cloudy day; or should I say, non-cloudy?

Drive Down

[pdfsmail]

Confirmed,

Went to google drive and I can see the interface, but not files, just continuously loads. Although I can access files in my Quick Access area.
Glad I back this up locally! Hopefully I wont lose Gigs of files like the last time I had an issue with them (a couple years ago).

Re:Drive Down

[tomhath]

Hey, the product is only in Beta. Go easy on him.

The root cause, of course...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that their workforce is not diverse enough.

Re:The root cause, of course...

[jellomizer]

That could be the case. Google like to hire a large subset of like minded people.
Someone with a different set of experience and life lessons, may had seen this problem beforehand and been able to fix it. Vs Google hiring kids who pass the IQ tests and are excited about the new and cool. Who just doesn't realize that there is always a single point of failure that needs to be addressed.

I know at my work environment which is very diverse, they are many different approaches to problems that allows us to handle things more thoroughly.
The young guy has fresh new ideas to problems, the older guy has experience to know where the problems are to the ideas, and can point out that this new idea was already tried. The person with more experience with dealing with politics, can determine if the idea will get past management or not. Then there is a person who will document everything.

Re:Ouch

[Swave An deBwoner]

Google is 10 times better than any other 99.99% uptime service, so 9 hours.

An outage or...

[BronsCon]

Is this really an outage, or do a bunch of people just owe them 12 cents?

Too bad, you're not the customer

[sremick]

Well, looks like people are getting their money's worth for Google Drive.

Remember: if something is free, you're not the customer... you're the product. Google doesn't give a flying fuck about you and your files beyond their ability to mine them for data that they can monetize by selling your privacy away to the highest bidder. They don't care if you lose data... tomorrow there'll be a 1000 new people to take your place even if you actually follow through with your empty threat to boycott them forever more.

The "cloud" is a joke. All it is is you storing YOUR files on someone ELSE'S computers... someone else who doesn't have one one-millionth of the vested interest in your files that you do, even if you DO opt for one of the pay cloud services. If your data is important to you, why would you pay a premium for some stranger who couldn't care less about your files to take ownership and responsibility for their care? Either step up and take responsibility for your own shit, or stop whining.

Re:Too bad, you're not the customer

[swillden]

Google doesn't give a flying fuck about you and your files beyond their ability to mine them for data that they can monetize by selling your privacy away to the highest bidder.

Two errors in the above:

First, Google doesn't data mine Drive files, unless the file in question is marked publicly-accessible by the user.

Actually, I doubt they mine even public docs for information about the doc owner; my guess that the terms of service include that escape hatch for public docs because they get added to the search index, and so searches may turn them up with ads alongside which would constitute a "marketing or promotional campaign", in the words of the ToS.

Second, Google doesn't sell user data, even for products that are advertising-based. Google makes money by using the data to target ads, not by selling the data to advertisers (or anyone else).

Remember: if something is free, you're not the customer... you're the product.

Often true, but many Drive users are paying customers. And the non-paying users are still customers, just customers getting the free loss leader in hopes of convincing them to buy.

The "cloud" is a joke. All it is is you storing YOUR files on someone ELSE'S computers... someone else who doesn't have one one-millionth of the vested interest in your files that you do, even if you DO opt for one of the pay cloud services.

Actually, I'd say that a cloud provider who makes billions on providing cloud services has a great vested interest in keeping your files safe and available. Oh, not so much about your files specifically, but the odds that just yours would get lost are negligible. If they were to lose data, it would hit lots of users... and that could easily cost them billions.

In particular, Google makes lots of money from enterprise users of Drive, Docs, etc. You can bet they're not going to jeopardize that. And, no, a few hours outage once per year or so isn't that big of a deal. That's less downtime than almost any self-hosted large-scale solution will achieve.

Either step up and take responsibility for your own shit, or stop whining.

I take responsibility for my own data, which is why I have a copy of it in Google Drive. Also, another copy on my desktop, one on my laptop and one on my wife's laptop. I used to run my own home file server, with RAID6 plus regular backups, and I dabbled for a while with automatic offset backups using Tahoe LAFS and a backup tool that I wrote. Then I wised up and started doing my offsite backups with a cloud provider and keeping a copy on each machine I use regularly. The result is safer, more reliable and much, much less work.

(Disclaimer/Disclosure: I work for Google. My relationship with Drive, however, is just that of a satisfied user.)

Re:What a coincidence!

[JohnFen]

In this day and age of Big Data analytics, there is no longer any such thing as data that is not sensitive. Even the most trivial of information, combined with other trivial information, can add up to a serious intrusion.

If you really must keep data in the cloud, it should all be encrypted (by you, not the cloud), no matter how insignificant that data may seem.

Re:What a coincidence!

[JohnFen]

Hmmm, it's as if there is a subset of people who think that it's impossible to have down time or lose data if you use your own hardware and backup strategy...

Of course it's not impossible. However, it's also not that hard to meet the same uptime targets as the cloud providers. Also, if it's all on your hardware, then it can be easier to recover from the problem.

It sucks when a major host goes down, because it affects many at once.

No. It sucks because when it happens, the users are 100% powerless to do anything about it.

For many organizations, it's virtually guaranteed that Google or other hosts will do a better job than a roll your own solution.

I would argue that this isn't true for any organization. A cloud host's advantage is not that they can do a better job than you, it's that they'll save you time and money. A big part of what you sacrifice for that convenience is control and the ability to correct the inevitable problems.

Whether or not that's worth it depends on your (or your business') particular cost/benefit formula.