If you've been frantically refreshing Google Docs or wondering why your Drive won't load, you're not alone. Google is currently dealing with an outage affecting Docs, Drive, and Sheets—and it started around 12:00 PM ET today.

What's Going On?

Three of Google's core productivity tools are down:

• Google Docs
• Google Drive
• Google Sheets

The good news? Gmail, Meet, and Calendar are still working fine. The bad news? If your work lives in Docs and Sheets (like most of us), you're probably having a rough afternoon.

Who's Feeling the Pain?

Remote teams are scrambling to find alternative ways to share files. That collaborative doc everyone was editing? Yeah, that's frozen.

Schools and universities are in a tough spot too. Students can't submit assignments, teachers can't access lesson plans, and any LMS integrations with Google Drive are basically broken right now.

Businesses using Sheets for tracking sales, finances, or project management are stuck. No access to spreadsheets means a lot of decision-making just stopped.

The Bigger Picture

Here's the thing—this isn't Google's first rodeo this year. We've seen major outages in June, July, and even a massive AWS failure in October. It's becoming clear that when millions of people depend on a single cloud provider, outages like this can bring entire organizations to a standstill.

What Should You Do?

Right now:

• Use Slack, Teams, or email to communicate with your team
• Check Google's status dashboard for updates
• Don't keep refreshing—it won't help

For next time:

• Keep offline copies of critical documents
• Have a backup plan for when cloud services go down
• Consider what happens to your business if your primary tools disappear for a few hours

The Bottom Line

Google's still working on fixing this (last update was around 2:45 PM ET), but they haven't given an ETA. For now, it's a waiting game—and a good reminder that even tech giants aren't invincible.

Your move? Maybe grab a coffee and tackle those tasks that don't require Google. Or finally clean up your inbox.

Update: Check https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/ for the latest status.

How's this outage affecting your workday? Let us know in the comments.

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