Google suffers major outage leaving Americans locked out of private data across US

Google users throughout the US have been cut off from their private data due to a massive outage affecting server connections.

According to outage-tracking website Downdetector, users of Google Drive currently can't access their files, with widespread reports of server connection failures and  an inability to open documents like Google Sheets or Docs.

Users regularly rely on Google Drive for everyday cloud storage, real-time collaboration on work or school projects, and seamless syncing across phones, laptops, and tablets.

'Please fix Google, people got school and work and they depend on Docs!' one frustrated user commented Wednesday afternoon. 

At 1pm ET, there were nearly 3,000 reports of problems using Google Drive, with half of those reports citing the main problem as server connection issues.

More than a third of users were having issues accessing their private files.

'It says: "Can't open this file. This file isn’t available without an internet connection,"' one person reported while trying to use Google Drive.

The largest outage zones have impacted Americans in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

The issues with Google Drive reportedly started around 12.25pm. 

Google's Workspace Status Dashboard updated their tracker at 1.44pm, noting that the company is dealing with a 'service outage' affecting Google Docs, Google Drive, and Google Sheets.

'Our engineering team continues to investigate the issue,' the company announced, noting that there was currently no workaround for this issue.

'My personal account works, but I cannot reach the server on my school account for docs,' a student explained in the comments on Downdetector's website. 'Very frustrating because I have to finish my memo.'

Google Drive is a free cloud service from Google where people store photos, videos, documents, and other files online so they can access them from any phone, tablet, or computer.

It lets you create and edit the company's Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps in real time with others, automatically backing up that data, and working across all devices without the need for a USB drive.

'Was working on a Google doc when it suddenly acted like I had no internet (not true),' one person revealed. 'I need to access my default account for school but whenever I click the icon for it it redirects me.'

Multiple Google users have reported that their access came back momentarily but they quickly lost the connection to their data again after a few moments.