Written by Zack Whittaker / Courtesy of ZDNet

Google Docs, Gmail hit by service disruption; company says it’s investigating

The search giant said it was “investigating reports” of issues with three of its main cloud-based productivity apps, following reports of sluggish or downed service.

Google is currently investigating reports that a number of its business-related services are suffering downtime.

According to the company’s status pages, two Google Apps services — Gmail, and Google Docs (including Google Presentations) — were experiencing a “service disruption” as of 10:25 am on the east U.S coast. An update more than an hour later confirmed that the delivery of some messages may be “delayed,” while “attachments may fail to download.”

According to Google, email delays are affecting less than half of all Gmail users. But Google noted that the remaining Gmail issues are only affecting an estimate 0.024 percent of the service’s entire global user base.

Anecdotal reports from the web and here in our New York newsroom suggest that some emails are taking longer to send and arrive than usual. Some Gmail accounts are simply failing to send any messages at all.

The company did not say how many Google Docs customers are affected by the disruption. Google later confirmed it would have additional updates at 2:45 pm (ET). We will update the piece as and when we get more.

We’ve put in questions to Google, but did not hear back at the time of writing.