On Wednesday, November 12, 2025, many users of Google Workspace including the popular apps Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Slides reported difficulty accessing files and services, as the company confirmed a significant service disruption.
What Happened
According to tracking site Downdetector, user reports began rising sharply around 9 a.m. PST (12 p.m. EST) when users attempted to open Drive, Docs or Sheets but were met with errors such as “This site can’t provide a secure connection / ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR”.
Google’s own Workspace Status Dashboard noted that the incident began at approximately that same time, with access failures affecting multiple productivity-apps.
The breakdown of problem reports revealed that about half of users cited server connection issues, while more than a third reported being unable to access their own files.
Who Was Affected
As one of the world’s largest productivity platforms, Google Drive alone supports over a billion users globally, with more than 800 million daily users, meaning the potential impact was substantial.
Business teams, educational institutions and individual users alike rely on these tools for collaboration and storage, so the outage rippled across multiple sectors.
Resolution Status
Google engineers were reported to be investigating the root cause, but no precise time-to-fix was given initially.
By late afternoon the volume of user reports began to decline, and Google’s status dashboard later logged the incident as lasting approximately 4 hours 45 minutes.
Actions Users Can Take During Cloud Outages
Being prepared can help users and organizations stay productive when cloud services face interruptions. Here are some practical steps to protect your work and reduce downtime:
- Have a backup strategy: Keep local or alternate copies of critical files and consider offline access options for important documents.
- Follow official status channels: Monitor Google’s Workspace Status Dashboard to stay informed of any incident.
- Plan for interruption: Businesses should incorporate cloud-service risk into continuity planning thinking ahead about what happens if key apps become unavailable.
- Explore redundancy: Depending on your organization’s needs, evaluate parallel services or fail-over tools to mitigate single-provider outage risk.
Takeaways
While the outage has now been resolved and services are reported to be back to normal, the event serves as a timely reminder that no cloud system is immune to disruption. Whether you’re a user, IT manager or decision-maker, building resilience into your workflows is no longer optional, it’s essential.
Related Read:
- Amazon AWS Outage Disrupts Major Apps and Websites Worldwide
- Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram Down in Major UK Outage
- Google Service Outage on 18 July 2025
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