Google Drive: 3 outages in a week

Google Drive, the cloud storage and applications suite used by millions at home and at work, has suffered three service interruptions this week, making it impossible at times for affected users to access their files and applications.

On March 18, 2013, from 3:17 PM to 5:35 PM UTC+1, some users requests to Google Drive experienced “Server Error 503” messages when trying to access Google Drive. Applications using the Google Drive and Docs APIs also returned errors. The root cause of this service disruption was an issue in the network control software.

A portion of Google’s network capacity went offline due to a novel bug in its control software. User traffic was redirected to other network connections and servers. This load has increased the latency and triggered a second bug in the software that manages user connections and sessions with Google Drive. This resulted in errors and timeouts for some users who were attempting to access Google Drive through the affected servers.

On March 19, 2013, for 6:03 PM to 7:29 PM UTC+1, some users experienced “Server Error 503” messages, long load times, or timeouts when trying to access Google Drive. Applications using the Google Drive and Docs APIs also returned errors. The root cause of this service disruption was an issue in the software that manages user connections and sessions with Google Drive like the day before.

On March 21, 2013, from 2:31 PM to March 22, 2013 1:41 AM UTC+1, Google Drive suffer another issues for all users. Some users were able to access Drive, but were experienced slow behavior or sporadic errors.
Google did not yet explained the root cause of this issues.

(Press source, Google report for March 18, Google report for March 19, Google report for March 21)