The partial outage that Google's productivity suite was suffering from is over, so Google Docs and other Google Drive services can be used as normal.

Earlier today, when attempting to create a new Google Doc, an error message appeared after an unusually long loading time. The Google message advised users to try to refresh and wait patiently for the problem to be resolved. We tried this too, but it did not work at the time. However, now Google Docs and all other affected services like Sheets and Slides seem to be working fine.

We do not know the exact cause, but since Google Drive is a cloud-based service, it seems that something went wrong on Google's end.

"As of 9:20 a.m. PST on April 12, we have resolved an issue with creating new or copying existing Google documents, slides, and sheets within Google Workspace and Google Workspace for Education accounts, and copying existing Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets within your Google Workspace and Google Workspace for Education accounts. Please see the Workspace Status Dashboard for details.

At the time, when trying to create a new Google Doc in Chrome's Google Drive or the browser's Docs app, the page took a long time to load and an error message appeared. Google Docs has encountered an error. Please reload this page or try again in a few minutes."

However, I found that I could write and edit existing documents. But that was less than ideal for those who rely on Google Docs for their daily work.

Unfortunately, at the time, the only solution was to wait for Google to fix the problem or use other world processing services and productivity tools: if you're using Windows 10, you can use Microsoft Word as well as the Office suite. But for a free service, OpenOffice offers a solid word processor. macOS has the Pages app.

Google fixed this problem fairly quickly. But it's also a good sign that no matter how useful cloud-based services are, especially when it comes to storing and sharing files and folders, when they go down, a single major failure can completely derail your workflow.