Google Drive Faces Outage, Users Report [Update] (google.com) 75
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.
Update: 09/07 17:13 GMT: Google says it has resolved the issue.
Awww (Score:5, Funny)
Google's having a cloudy day; or should I say, non-cloudy?
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It's working fine for me. If it was ever down, it wasn't for long.
Drive Down (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
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Why THE FUCK would you use a file sharing service that has lost data for you in the past? That seems kinda' insane.
Re:Drive Down (Score:4, Funny)
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Because for many people it is just an 'sharing' product.
Everything that is there is on the computer, too!
And: for many people there are no alternatives anyway, hont: Chrome Book.
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99.99% uptime 365 allows for almost 9 hours every year. A full business day of work.
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.9 hours
Re:Ouch (Score:4, Funny)
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or a small corner of Montana that 99% of the population will never go to.
bad comparison. no points in time during your lifetime are optional.
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The root cause, of course... (Score:4, Funny)
Is that their workforce is not diverse enough.
Re:The root cause, of course... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Medical Doctors and Nurses are often well trained at diagnosing problems.
The artist may be able to look at the problem with a different angle to prevent people from starting at the same line of code.
A tribal leader would have leadership experience to direct the right people and right number to help solve the problem
If the company hires similar people chances are they will be staring at the wrong line of code or both trying to fix it with the same approach.
Why would a Nurse or an Artist wouldn't be a White g
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Hhahaha funny enough the only person I know who works for Google, works in the Google Drive division and is female.
Make of that anecdote what you will :-)
*Kidding she's a walking genius.
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You hire liberals to innovate, and conservatives to maintain the day to day, If you make the conservatives feel unwelcome, ostracize them, fire them if they speak out, and so on... well... even what little conservatives you have wont be performing at top efficiency even if they wanted to, and they might not want to (they might want to watch it all burn.)
What a coincidence! (Score:1, Insightful)
My files stored locally on my external drive are also not available!
Just kidding. Store your own damn files on your own damn hardware, fools.
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Why not do both? Then if your external drive dies, or you are not at home / the office with it, or whatever... you have multiple copies of your data in multiple physical locations. That is how it should be done :)
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Anything that is sensitive should be encrypted first, of course. Depends on what you are storing.
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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.
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Sure, you could keep your master copies on a home network and open ports for remote access... but even more easily you could use Google Drive, and not have to worry about potentially opening holes in your home network. Then, use Google Drive's various platform apps to keep local backups of the data on your Drive - and keep an additional periodic backup externally, so that if you accidentally change or delete something that propagates to the various local versions of Drive you can still go back and get an ol
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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 c
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I don't think that we're disagreeing as much as you imply.
For small to medium size businesses? It's not as easy as you imply.
It depends on how many 9s you need. For most small and medium businesses, 4 or 5 nines (plus adequate backups) are more than sufficient. You can achieve that with a couple of high-quality RAIDs that are geographically separated (particularly if you park them in a third party server farm that provides things like UPS).
It's virtually impossible to do cost effectively.
I disagree with the "virtually impossible" part. But, ignoring that, here is where we aren't really disagreeing that much: doing this y
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(RAID is not a backup!)
I never said otherwise. I was talking about live reliability, not backups.
And, of course, if your RAID setups are in a third party server farm, you're in the same boat as people using google/aws/etc.
Not at all. If I have hardware sitting in a farm, and the farm goes down, I can still physically go there and retrieve my hard drives.
is far beyond the financial capabilities of the vast majority of small businesses and even many medium size businesses.
Well, we'll have to agree to disagree on this. I manage it, and I'm not wealthy.
The hate on "the cloud" (the actual service, not the term) for its imperfections is just as irrational as hating on FedEx/UPS/USPS for their imperfections.
In a sense, yes. In another sense, it's understandable since cloud providers tend to sell themselves as being without such imperfections.
I never said it was impossible.
Then why are we debating? Since my only assertion was that it's possible and for some,
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RAID is not in itself a backup, but a second raid off site certainly can be.
News? (Score:2)
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The news element isn't that a site is down, it's that freakin' *Google* is down. If you've heard of them, you might clue in as to *why* it's news.
Well, I feel sorry for you, anonymous coward.
Its not news.
Google is, in fact, NOT down.
Just a single service, from over 100+ online ones.
You will have to watch your porn collection later.
99.99% uptime = 0.01% downtime (Score:2)
The problem with great SLAs is that if you really want your data all the time, you have to plan for it and have another copy somewhere that isn't being affected by the bad day that your primary provider is having...no matter how remote the chance. Enterprise IT folks deal with this all the time, balancing need for always-on vs. the cost to make that happen.
Some outages are worse than others too. Cloud providers can have situations where they'll lose access to small portions of their environment, but when yo
An outage or... (Score:5, Funny)
RIAA MPAA (Score:1)
Too bad, you're not the customer (Score:3)
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.
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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 sel
Face Outage? (Score:2)
I've read TFS and TFA, and I still don't know what a "face outage" is, or how Google drives it.