We are currently in the Great Google Disruption of 2015. Well, okay, that’s a bit of drama but there are several service from the company that are degraded. The most notable is Google Drive where people are able to log in but they don’t see any files or folders. Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides are also impacted by the outage which started at 10:55 AM Pacific. There is no word on what the issue is or when it will be resolved.
For those who want to keep up with such outages or other service impacting things from Google, there is a single site that is the place to go for information: The App Status Dashboard.
The App Status Dashboard is a free site that gives you near real-time information on all of the Google services and if they are good-to-go, having a disruption or completely out of service. In the
Google App Status Site
case of today’s issues, it is a disruption meaning that it isn’t impacting everyone. You can find the Dashboard by going to this link. The site is best viewed in a browser on a tablet or PC as it is not optimized for mobile but even with Chrome on my Nexus 6 you can view things quite easily.
The Apps Status Dashboard also has a RSS feed if you want to pump it into your favorite RSS reader (I use Feedly) so it will update you there along with your other feeds.
Google App Status Dashboard Can Save You Frustration
Before you start pressing the buttons on your phone really hard or mashing your fist into your monitor for unresponsive services, be sure to check the dashboard. It can save you a world of frustration and there is a bit of comfort sometimes in knowing that you aren’t the only one experiencing an issue with a service. And, just so you know, you can find similar dashboards from the likes of Apple and Microsoft on their websites. This can be handy too if you use services from those other companies too.
