If you are one of the many people in the world who relies heavily on Google’s various services to do your day to day business then there is a good chance you’re experiencing a great deal of frustration today. Earlier today Google reported that its Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides services were experiencing an outage and as of this writing they are still not up and running for many people. Google has not given a time frame for when we can expect these services to be operational again so it looks like people have no choice but to wait patiently. This is a good reminder, however, of the potential difficulties one may encounter when relying on cloud based services.
While there is no question that services like Google Drive and Google Docs have been extremely helpful in making many workplaces more streamlined and functional, one can’t help but be a little concerned about relying too heavily on them because internet issues and various other inconveniences like the one we are seeing today aren’t that uncommon. If your entire work day revolves around being able to communicate via Google Docs and then all of a sudden you can’t use that service, then productivity is nil and a lot of time and money is wasted. One would have to assume that workplaces that use these services would have a Plan B in place but the amount of wasted time coupled with the likelihood of decreased goodwill towards Google is something Google needs to be very mindful of if they expect people to continue to want to use their services. It seems almost clich© to say at this point, but it is indeed true that the tech world is at its most competitive and it certainly wouldn’t take anything more than one bad day with Google’s services to get people to start looking elsewhere.
Hopefully Google is learning from the experiences they are having today and outages like this are as rare an occurrence as possible. The reason so many people use these services is because, for the most part, they are very helpful and Google certainly would not want to jeopardize their solid reputation by not getting things fixed as quickly as possible. Until then, let’s all stop and reflect on what life was like before we “needed” things like Google Docs to get through a day of work and clouds were strictly in the sky.