Google Docs goes down for hour

Alphabet Inc. handed procrastinators a good excuse not to work Friday. Its Google Drive Web-based productivity tools went down for almost three hours.Google acknowledged the outage in a tweet just before noon PT. By 2:30 p.m., “Google Docs” was the top trending item on Twitter. Google said service was restored a few minutes later.The Google Apps status dashboard showed service disruptions impacted Google Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides on Friday. Alphabet didn’t respond to a request for comment.

For some, this meant early Friday drinks, watching baseball playoff games, and trying to avoid other ways of doing work. Microsoft Office still appears to work just fine.

“Our preliminary diagnosis is that this was caused by a code push which behaved differently in widespread use than it had during testing,” Google said in an emailed statement.

 The main website for Google Drive and Slides, the presentation counterpart to Docs and Sheets, at first appeared to be unaffected but later also went down. Classroom, which is used in schools, also went down, according to the company.

"Google Drive, Docs editors and Classroom have been restored for 99.5% of affected users as of 1:01 PM Pacific, and for the remaining 0.5% of users by 2:10 PM Pacific," Google said in a statement. "During the event, our top priority was to restore service."

During the disruption, users who tried to open documents, spreadsheets and presentations from Google Drive were greeted with error messages. Others were unable to load Google Drive's website at all.