Educators And Students Hit Hard By Google Drive Outages As School Begins

On the first day of school for many parts of the U.S. on Tuesday, Google Drive suffered outages and slowdowns for many users, causing major problems for educators and remote students.

Following a wave of tweets complaining about the issues, Google Drive’s official Twitter account confirmed the outage and promised to resolve it. “The affected users are able to access Google Drive, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior,” the Status Dashboard report read.

According to the G Suite Dashboard, Google began addressing the service disruption at around 10:30 a.m. EDT. By 1:23 p.m. EDT, the issues were resolved, but that didn't stop the outage from trending on the social media site.

An outage map making the rounds on Twitter showed major cities heavily affected by the outage, including users in Los Angeles, San Diego, Atlanta, Denver, Boston, and New York City.

Going by the many tweets about the issue, students and educators in the U.S. Students reported trouble accessing assignment files and lamented the issue cropping up on the first day of classes. Educators reported similar problems accessing presentation files, while other faculty members reported being unable to give instruction to teachers about remote learning.

“The service disruption with Google Drive should be resolved,” the company began tweeting to users a little after 2 p.m. EDT Tuesday. “We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.”