Google Drive malfunction has become a nightmare for…

Google Drive malfunction has become a nightmare for users who rely on the platform

Users are flagging a mysterious Google Drive malfunction that is putting the service's trustworthiness into question. The Google Workspace platform, which users rely on to store their personal and professional documents in up to 15 GB of free space, is angering users as they are reporting that some of their files in Drive have gone missing.

“I used the drive few days ago and last morning this horrible problem happened. very devastating and the files are very important to me,” said one user who reported the issue last week on a Google Drive Help thread.

The user, with the username Yeonjoong, claimed that their files created between May and Nov. 21 have suddenly disappeared. After reaching out to multiple Google Support teams in order to receive instructions on how to recover their files, none of the proposed solutions were able to solve the issue.

Several users in the thread responded to the post by saying that they also are suddenly experiencing the same issue, and that it has caused chaos within their organizations.

“This also happened to us today. Even files that were uploaded through the web interface by my team over the last year all vanished. Not only my Drive on Desktop files. This is super super bad, as all of our companies files are lying there…” said one user.

Another user claimed that they started to experience the same issue shortly after they updated Google Drive.

“The exact same thing happened to me when Drive updated. All of my files modified or created since May have disappeared. 1000s of files and folders. Support has been working on it for a over a week,” said the user.

With the Covid pandemic boosting the shift to remote work in the past several years, many companies have adopted the use of Google Workspace, which includes Google Drive, to organize files and encourage productivity.

In April, it was reported that the tool has over six million paying business customers, according to statistics from Google Workspace manager Patronum. So a glitch that causes months of work to be deleted could wreak havoc on organizations that rely on the platform.

As Google has yet to release a statement on the issue, the topic trended on x, with users expressing that the sudden malfunction in Google Drive should serve as a lesson for consumers to not put all of their eggs into one basket, and to back up their work on several hard drives.