Google Investigates Google Drive Disruption

Google admitted Monday morning that its cloud-based Google Drive service is experiencing a service disruption. According to a statement made on Google's service dashboard, "We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Drive. We will provide more information shortly."

Reports of trouble accessing Google Drive spread across social networks such as Twitter Monday. Users from around the globe reported trouble connecting to the service, as well as service crashes.

Google Drive is Google's cloud-based storage and productivity service. It encompasses Google Docs, Sheets and Presentations, in addition to providing document and file storage. Google Drive is accessible from various avenues, including Web browsers, desktop apps and apps for Android and iOS devices. The standalone mobile apps appear to be working more consistently at the moment when compared to the browser-based versions of the service.

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Google Drive and its associated products are used by a growing number of businesses and consumers around the world. Google Drive offers free storage and Web-based alternatives to Microsoft's Office product.

According to Google's service dashboard, its other services are running without trouble. That runs contrary to complaints on social networks, which suggest that Gmail and Google Reader, in particular, are also experiencing problems.

Google Reader, which Google recently announced that it plans to discontinue, experienced a significant service disruption earlier this year. During that disruption, Reader often marked as "new" items that had been marked as "read" by the user. The last time Gmail saw a notable problem was in December 2012.

Google had yet to provide an update more than an hour after first acknowledging the issue on Monday. The company has not said when users can expect Google Drive to be fully restored.

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