
Google Sheets was down - 1-6
http://sheets.google.com
======
9wzYQbTYsAIc
“ Google Drive service has already been restored for some users, and we expect
a resolution for all users within the next 1 hours. Please note this time
frame is an estimate and may change.” per their status page about 7 minutes
ago

------
michaelmarkell
Same for me. Getting 'backendError' from the sheets api.

    
    
        data: {
          error: {
            code: 503,
            message: 'The service is currently unavailable.',
            errors: [
              {
                message: 'The service is currently unavailable.',
                domain: 'global',
                reason: 'backendError'
              }
            ],
            status: 'UNAVAILABLE'
          }
        }

------
Vaslo
I just want to say as someone in Finance who works in Spreadsheets all day
that Google Sheets is just NOT a replacement for Excel. All the functions,
size, and some of the external tools built for Excel are just not in Sheets. I
know some of you say “well of course not for what you do” but there are
Microsoft haters who just wont believe me when I say that.

~~~
pradn
I work at the Google office in Chelsea, New York. One day, my old manager and
I were talking about the future of GSuite and how entrenced MS Office is. We
were next to a south-facing window and he pointed out toward all the buildings
in downtown Manhattan: "all those buildings run off of Excel."

I think the collaboration benefits of Google Sheets is high enough that it can
be the default for most employees. Perhaps MS Excel should be used only by
specialists, like how only a fraction of any company uses Photoshop.

~~~
nwalker85
Collaboration was certainly my driver for using Google Sheets, but most, if
not all, of that functionality is in Excel Online now.

~~~
filleokus
Is Excel Online still as slow as it used to be a couple of years ago? I
remember reading (perhaps here on HN) about how it basically spun up a
headless Excel instance for each user since they couldn't extract and decouple
all the functionality necessary to run some of the more advanced features.

EDIT:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17304660](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17304660)
(June 2018)

> Excel is a different world and a big-big elephant that won't likely be
> rewritten any years soon. Think of a code that is maintained over 30 years.
> Literally, developers are still maintaining code written in the 90s. Trying
> to bring Excel to the online world made MS create an architecture of html
> frontend which communicates with a dll session behind the scenes. As weird
> as it sounds, this dll lives as long as the browser has the spreadsheet
> opened. Think of it as MS raising VM for every excel file that is opened
> over the internet. While this is not very cost effective (saying the least)
> and not very performance friendly (hey ma! I made an understatement) this
> allowed them to move forward with Excel online very quickly by having a UI
> communicating with the bloatware dll that runs on the background in Azure.
> Summarizing Excel, it probably won't also be rewritten in js.

~~~
tmpz22
I have the utmost faith in MS being able to do JS/Web optimizations after what
they've been able to do with Visual Studio Code.

~~~
paulddraper
The difference is that VS Code was built ground up entirely separate in every
way from Visual Studio.

There was zero compatibility to maintain, zero code to port, etc.

------
james_s_tayler
Did anyone else initially misread the title as "Google Sheets is shutting
down"?

Or was that just me?

~~~
uoaei
You can be forgiven for that, considering how often "Google $GSERVICE is
shutting down" appears on HN's front page.

~~~
j-james
Currently on HN's front page: Google's App Maker is shutting down

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22160891](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22160891)

------
1-6
[https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status](https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status)

------
rossdavidh
Thought for the day: spreadsheets have done more computing related to how
business (and government and non-profits and schools) run, than any other
programming language, including heavy lifters like COBOL or Java. Can I back
that up with data? Of course not. But, having worked as a contractor in
manufacturing (three different industries), university, advertising, magazine,
real estate, gene sequencing, finance, and edutech, I have little doubt.

My preferred tool is python, I use javascript and/or SQL when I need to, I
have dabbled in R, I have programmed in legacy applications on mainframes.
Spreadsheets are more widely used than any of these, for doing computing that
impacts how organizations actually run.

~~~
tehsauce
Would it be wrong to say that the language which the spreadsheet software is
implemented in is also doing computing related to business?

~~~
rossdavidh
Hey, it's all Assembler if you go down far enough.

------
hateful
It wasn't just me!

Though it was interesting that googling "google sheets down" and clicking News
returned 3 results regarding winter weather bedding and 0 results about Google
Sheets.

~~~
konschubert
Too many people enter “google” in every search they do...

------
Centigonal
up for me now. Google SREs must be busy today!

~~~
Alex3917
Maybe they accidentally shut down the wrong product.

~~~
st0le
They just announced AppMaker is shutting down (soon). So...maybe?

~~~
bnt
Maybe something was connected that nobody thought of

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leothekim
Drive is down as well.

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sbmthakur
Seems like they got it up quickly. But would still love to read a post-mortem.

------
koliber
So were portions of Google Slides. I could not open some slide decks, while
others were unaffected. This made me sweat as I was 15 minutes away from a
very important presentation.

~~~
m-p-3
I always export my slides before an important presentation just in case, not
gonna get burned by the cloud!

~~~
Shish2k
> not gonna get burned by the cloud!

Surely if the problem is "the cloud disappeared", that's more a case of
sunburn? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
cheapgeek
Google Docs, Drive, and Photos all seem to be affected.

Currently have to download my files from Google and work on them in Excel and
Word to get work done.

~~~
OrgNet
class action coming up

~~~
herohamp
I'm not aware of there being any SLAs for these services?

~~~
ficklepickle
I'm hoping that was a joke. Most people don't even pay for it.

Did this affect gsuite as well? Either was I'm sure the TOS would never allow
it. While you're at it suing google, might as well get a precedent set making
TOS unenforceable.

~~~
JaggedJax
This did affect us on gsuite. We were receiving an error telling us we were
blocked due to unusual suspicious activity coming from our ip. It was pretty
misleading and took a little bit to realize that wasn't the case.

~~~
fairenough42
Did you have retry logic that triggered when Sheets started failing requests?
Maybe that looked like a DDoS attack while the problem persisted.

~~~
londons_explore
Google internally use the DDos blocking system to block requests to reduce
load on critical systems during outages. (It's common for systems to require
reduced load during startup because caches are still filling and user requests
after an outage are often more expensive to process)

------
ccarpenterg
Google Docs is having some issues too.

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tomashertus
I’m having issues with web version of Google Calendar as well.

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Havoc
hmm I had assumed it's our firewall freaking out. Got warnings about unusual
traffic that looked more well FW like.

Drive stayed up for us though

~~~
zamadatix
Same. Gave me a good sized shock for a moment when I read it was saying the
IPv4 address I was sourcing from wasn't one assigned to our company. Then I
realized it was just the IP of our cloud security proxy.

------
danicgross
An aside, but what do you do when your Google Sheet becomes too big?

I find things break down very quickly (based on number of collaborators or
file size), and I'm writing (yet again) some type of Flask-Admin server.
Retool ([https://retool.com](https://retool.com)) is another option I've
considered.

Any others?

~~~
davedx
I'm currently working on [https://LightSheets.app](https://LightSheets.app) \-
it's going to be a high performance spreadsheet application. Today I managed
to successfully import a 5 GB CSV file with ~50 million rows of data (around
10x more than Excel or Sheets can manage). Next steps will be a serialization
format for spreadsheets this size, not sure exactly how this will work yet.

What kind of limits do you find you hit regarding the number of collaborators?

~~~
mewpmewp2
Love how fast your site loaded on my mobile phone. Props man.

~~~
uoaei
2.39 KB landing page? A blurb above the fold not only addressing the purpose
of this product but also the context that it's addressing? A digestible list
of features and improvements over alternatives?

An exemplar to aspire to, for sure. Bravo!

~~~
davedx
Really kind of you, thanks. Now my challenge is to make an app that lives up
to the landing page - some of the things are definitely challenging!

------
ksec
I dont remember Google's Search Engine had outages. ( May be once in the past
10 years ) Why is it all the other products, from GCP to Google Sheet had more
outages?

And Google was suppose to compete with Microsoft Azure or Office 365?

~~~
liamdiprose
From Google's Site Reliability Engineering book[1]:

> SRE’s goal is no longer "zero outages"; rather, SREs and product developers
> aim to spend the error budget getting maximum feature velocity. This change
> makes all the difference. An outage is no longer a "bad" thing—it is an
> expected part of the process of innovation, and an occurrence that both
> development and SRE teams manage rather than fear.

I suspect Search has a lower error budget than Sheets.

[1] [https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-
book/chapters/introductio...](https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-
book/chapters/introduction/)

~~~
JohnFen
> An outage is no longer a "bad" thing—it is an expected part of the process
> of innovation, and an occurrence that both development and SRE teams manage
> rather than fear.

As a user, outages are _always_ bad things. That Google's SRE team thinks
otherwise is chilling.

~~~
joshuamorton
Of course outages are bad. But if the choice is "our service occasionally goes
down" and "we never release new features", you may accept the risk of
occasionally going down.

So yeah, outages are always bad, but the alternatives can be worse.

~~~
JohnFen
> if the choice is "our service occasionally goes down" and "we never release
> new features", you may accept the risk of occasionally going down.

I don't think that I would, because I don't accept the premise of that being
the necessary choice. It's just the choice that the providers deign to offer
for economic reasons.

But my objection isn't that there should be zero downtime. My objection is the
idea that a service provider considers any downtime to be acceptable.

~~~
joshuamorton
> My objection is the idea that a service provider considers any downtime to
> be acceptable.

If you don't view any downtime to be acceptable, the logical thing to do is
invest all of your resources into reducing downtime. This means solely
investing in reliability infrastructure, redundancy, and making few or no
changes to the system, since change introduces failure.

Since no service does that, the logical conclusion is that very few people
actually consider any downtime unacceptable. Broadly speaking, I can think of
literally no service that advertises "zero downtime". Cold storage gets close,
but even they offer a measly 12 or 16 9s of reliability.

In other words, reliability is a business goal, much like any other business
goal. Trying to achieve "perfect" reliability with limited resources isn't a
good time. So looking at error budgets empowers SREs. You can go to leaders
and say "hey we're exceeding our error budget, so we not making any more
changes and only working on reliability until we're back within our agreed
reliability."

~~~
JohnFen
I think I have utterly failed to successfully convey the point I was trying to
make.

My point was not that I expect zero downtime or perfect reliability. My point
is that I expect that companies don't consider downtime to be an acceptable
and normal thing.

~~~
joshuamorton
> My point is that I expect that companies don't consider downtime to be an
> acceptable and normal thing.

And my point is that if a company isn't doing this, they're idiots. SRE is
entirely about planning for downtime. You have incident response procedures to
minimize downtime when problems happen. You have tools like error budgets to
make explicit your organizational goals. But all of these are predicated on
the assumption that incidents (and downtime) are a "normal" thing that will
happen.

Again, if SRE's goal is _solely_ to minimize downtime at the cost of other
organizational priorities, there's a very simple way to do that: disallow all
new features and maintain the same app today. That would easily cut outages
for most apps by a factor of ten.

> My point is that I expect that companies don't consider downtime to be an
> acceptable

So you think its unacceptable to have an SLA? That's a very common way of
making explicit the amount of downtime the organization feels is acceptable.
This kind of error budgets is just a non-public SLA that's used to guide
development, as opposed to pay people. I'm curious what companies you use that
publish 100% uptime guarantees, or similar SLAs.

~~~
JohnFen
> So you think its unacceptable to have an SLA? That's a very common way of
> making explicit the amount of downtime the organization feels is acceptable.

Perhaps we mean different things by "acceptable". SLAs are a promise that
downtime won't exceed certain levels. They are not a declaration that downtime
is "acceptable", only that it's inevitable and is an attempt to characterize
that inevitability.

What I mean is that when downtime happens, nobody at the company should be
think "this is fine". They should be very concerned and engaging in urgent and
speedy resolution to the problem.

The idea that a service is expecting and accepting downtime as part of normal
operation and, even worse, as part of some sort of tradeoff with regards to
developing new features is just bizarre and unacceptable to me.

It indicates a level of unconcern about customer needs and experience that
renders the service untrustworthy.

~~~
joshuamorton
But again, this just acknowledges reality. You only have a finite number of
employees. If you aren't devoting all of them to reliability and stability,
you're making a trade off with feature velocity.

Being aware of that trade off is more organizationally mature than not

> What I mean is that when downtime happens, nobody at the company should be
> think "this is fine". They should be very concerned and engaging in urgent
> and speedy resolution to the problem.

If you think this, you've entirely misunderstood. Error budgets aren't about
outages when they happen. Individual outages should be dealt with quickly and
without delay. But when making planning decisions for the next year or
quarter, that's when error budgets matter.

