Google Drive goes down and takes worldwide productivity with it (updated)

Google Drive is having some major issues this morning. Starting around 7:30am PT, Google’s file storage service, which forms the backbone of much of Google’s G Suite, became either unreachable or incredibly slow, depending on where you were. Since then, the problems have only continued and Google doesn’t currently have an ETA for when the service will return to normal.

In addition to Drive, Google Classroom is also suffering an outage. That one is likely related because Classroom, Google’s tool for teachers and students, uses Drive for saving attachments.

While outages are inevitable, it’s unusual for a Google service to go down for this long without any indication for when it will come back. This will definitely cost Google, which is trying hard to get enterprises to adopt its platform, given that it will reduce trust in a service that’s rather vital for a company to function.

It’s worth noting that this is Google’s second major Drive outage this year. In January, the service also went down for an extended period.

Update (8:38am PT): Google now says that service has been restored for some users and that it expects a resolution for all users “in the near future.”

Update (9:24am PT): and everything is back up again. “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.”