Google Drive down for some, Google 'investigating'

Google Drive, the online service for storing documents and files, is currently offline for many customers, putting a crimp in the productivity of anyone who uses the Big G's cloud-storage system.

I can confirm that trying to access some Google Docs is resulting in the above error page, while Techcrunch points to those on Twitter who are bemoaning the borked service.

"Are you guys doing anything about Drive being down currently and intermittent over the past 24 hours?" one tweeter writes. "Google Drive is spewing 502 errors and seriously slowing me down this morning," another says.

Google's status page identifies 'service disruption' for Google Drive, though currently reads Mail, Calendar, Documents and other services are running smoothly.

Google says, "We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Drive," promising to "provide more information shortly." An update to that reads, "We're aware of a problem with Google Drive affecting a significant subset of users.

"The affected users are unable to access Google Drive. We will provide an update by 3/18/13 4:10 PM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change."

Google Drive is a free service for storing files, eliminating the need for them to take up space on your hard drive and giving you access to your data from any computer. It's a very useful service, but it doesn't work when it's, er, broken. Fingers crossed Google sorts these issues swiftly.

Is Google Drive down for you, or is it functioning smoothly? Do you rely on Google's services for work, or do you prefer to keep your files stored on a physical hard drive for exactly this reason? Let me know in the comments, or on our Facebook wall.