Google Drive document lists go down, then come back up

Google Drive had some issues midday Friday, as users took to Twitter to report that they were finding their Drive file containers empty.

Google Drive is down … I goofed off too long and was about to get some work started and now it's not there. Figures!—
Karen Groves (@grovesdesign) May 10, 2013

Google Drive seems to be down. Damn!—
Elise Descamps (@elidesc) May 10, 2013

Obligatory "Google Drive is Down" tweet.—
Steven Cary (@sjcary) May 10, 2013

Google acknowledged that issues were afoot by indicating a “service disruption on its Apps Status Dashboard.

Google Drive service disruption reported on Google’s App Status Dashboard

“We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Drive. We will provide more information shortly,” Google reported.

Google PR had no further information to share.

According to the dashboard, the last time Drive service was disrupted was on April 17, for around three hours. Gmail, Talk, Groups, Contacts and other Google products were also affected. The day before that, there had been “a misconfiguration of (the) user authentication system,” which prompted login requests to ping fewer servers than what is normal. The problem turned out to be a capacity issue, as opposed to a heavy influx of traffic.

Before the April 17 incident, there were “disruptions” to Google Drive on March 18, 19 and 21.

Despite Friday’s disruption, files did show up back on the main drive at around noon Pacific time, though, so the disruption did not last long.

Nevertheless, this sort of event doesn’t help Google’s efforts to bring enterprises on board with Google Apps. It might also hurt Google prospects at gaining customers on Google Compute Engine and the Google Cloud Platform, as more enterprises flock to and expand their use of Amazon Web Services and other public clouds.