13th November 2025 – (Hong Kong) Google’s productivity suite suffered a widespread disruption on Wednesday, with users in Hong Kong among those reporting problems across key services including Drive, Docs, Sheets, Maps, Search and Gmail.
Monitoring site Downdetector recorded a spike in complaints shortly after midday U.S. Eastern Time, with reports surpassing 2,800 for Google Drive by around 1pm. Hundreds also flagged difficulties with Google Search, Sheets and Docs, alongside dozens of alerts related to Google Workspace more broadly. Many users cited server connection failures, while a significant share reported being unable to access personal files.
Google acknowledged the incident on its Workspace Status Dashboard, confirming access issues for Drive, Sheets and Docs starting around noon ET. The company said engineers were investigating and that the disruption was ongoing, but did not offer an estimated time to resolution. The status page noted some customers encountered SSL errors, including “This site can’t provide a secure connection / ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR”.
The outage affected multiple applications relied upon by businesses, schools and individuals for document creation, file storage and collaboration. With Google Drive serving more than a billion users and hundreds of millions engaging daily, the disruption had the potential to be widely felt. As of Wednesday afternoon, Google’s status centre indicated no available workaround.
Reports of the incident come amid a recent run of major cloud platform failures. In late October, Microsoft’s Azure service experienced a significant outage that disrupted enterprise tools and sectors from retail to aviation. A week earlier, Amazon Web Services endured an hours‑long failure impacting hundreds of prominent sites and apps.
In Hong Kong, users reported concurrent issues across Google Search, Maps and Gmail alongside Drive, Docs and Sheets, underscoring the breadth of Wednesday’s disruption. Google said it continues to investigate the root cause and will provide updates via the Workspace Status Dashboard.
