Google Sheets was down

http://sheets.google.com

by 1-6 • 6 years ago

144 100 6 years ago

sheets.google.com

1-6• 6 years ago

https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status

ccarpenterg• 6 years ago

Google Docs is having some issues too.

michaelmarkell• 6 years ago

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'
      }
    }

leothekim• 6 years ago

Drive is down as well.

cheapgeek• 6 years ago

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.

OrgNet2• 6 years ago

class action coming up

herohamp• 6 years ago

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

Centigonal• 6 years ago

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

Alex3917• 6 years ago

Maybe they accidentally shut down the wrong product.

st0le• 6 years ago

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

tananaev• 6 years ago

Already up for us as well.

9wzYQbTYsAIc• 6 years ago

“ 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

james_s_tayler• 6 years ago

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

Or was that just me?

uoaei3• 6 years ago

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

j-james• 6 years ago

Currently on HN's front page: Google's App Maker is shutting down

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22160891

sbmthakur• 6 years ago

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

danicgross• 6 years ago

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) is another option I've considered.

Any others?

mmastrac2• 6 years ago

I had a massive monte-carlo type sheet and ended up moving a bunch of logic/calculation into attached scripts. Far more reliable and less likely to wedge.

mkagenius• 6 years ago

Looks like you guys are working on some advanced use case of the sheets, is there anything I can look for such advanced usage. Like how people take more out of sheets. (I am using sheets with ifttt but nothing related to scripting in the sheets itself)

davedx5• 6 years ago

I'm currently working on 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• 6 years ago

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

sauwan• 6 years ago

Any way to subscribe to your development? I'd be willing/interested to beta test things.

Any chance of actually doing something about the response to microsoft's query about using python as a macro language?

hitpointdrew• 6 years ago

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

A database.

mint2• 6 years ago

I don’t understand all the posters talking about massive csv files in excel, sheets, etc.

How is that manageable or efficient and not error prone compared to a database or just csv processed with python or other code?

cosmodisk• 6 years ago

You move back to Excel. Every time I tried something heavyweight- it just can't handle.

nate• 6 years ago

I've been fooling with some giant CSV files for model training and yeah Google Sheets and Excel just freeze up or stop importing. So what I've found really handy to play and filter those giant files is Wizard Pro if you're on a mac: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wizard-pro/id497487206?mt=12

JohnFen5• 6 years ago

This sounds snarky, but I don't intend it that way at all. If your sheet is too big for Google, then you should be using a real spreadsheet application instead.

btown• 6 years ago

Airtable is great for rapid iteration with a relational-database data model. I've seen it used as everything from a CRM/ticket-tracker to a Kanban tool. A Pro plan supports up to 50k rows per "base" (schema), fully real-time collaborative.

Salesforce is also a platform that lets you do practically anything without coding. Beware though: here lie dragons, a hellish programming experience... and incredible levels of career stability as a Salesforce consultant.

pgrote• 6 years ago

We had to move to Excel. :(

CTOSian• 6 years ago

Try Visidata https://visidata.org/

tomashertus• 6 years ago

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

ksec2• 6 years ago

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?

draugadrotten• 6 years ago

Office 365 has multiple outages daily, so are you sure that was a good example?

lxgr• 6 years ago

Without knowing anything about the internals, I would assume that Sheets is significantly more stateful than search.

I wouldn't notice Google rerouting my search queries to a slightly stale cluster in a different data center, but they can hardly serve me someone else's spreadsheets until consistency has been restored.

chx• 6 years ago

There was a Google Search outage last September.

Eg.: https://twitter.com/iittmee/status/1173772524573908997 https://twitter.com/cryptoITGuy/status/1173773323970523136

Not even specific to Google, but a product like Search has less outages because it doesn't require authentication / authorization checks, one search requires very little network bandwidth (unlike say YouTube) and can even work if some / most / all systems needs to go into a read only mode.

liamdiprose• 6 years ago

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...

JohnFen5• 6 years ago

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.

davideous• 6 years ago

This interested me enough to read some of that chapter. Here are a few quotes that give more context:

Traditional operations teams and their counterparts in product development thus often end up in conflict, most visibly over how quickly software can be released to production. At their core, the development teams want to launch new features and see them adopted by users. At their core, the ops teams want to make sure the service doesn’t break while they are holding the pager. Because most outages are caused by some kind of change—a new configuration, a new feature launch, or a new type of user traffic—the two teams’ goals are fundamentally in tension.

...

The use of an error budget resolves the structural conflict of incentives between development and SRE. 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.

...

...the decision to stop releases for the remainder of the quarter once an error budget is depleted might not be embraced by a product development team unless mandated by their management.

azurezyq• 6 years ago

Well, actually Google search engine "outages" are fairly common, they are just less visible.

Examples:

Single data center outage:

Search -> load balancers handle that just fine

Cloud -> zone or sub-zone outage

Backend failure:

Search -> cache should handle that

Cloud -> outage

Data update failure:

Search -> stale search results

Cloud -> outage

Office 365 also has issues, they can be minimized but cannot be eliminated: https://twitter.com/msft365status?lang=en

Havoc• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

hateful• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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

koliber2• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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

Shish2k• 6 years ago

not gonna get burned by the cloud!

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

koliber2• 6 years ago

I grew to expect that it will always be there. I will follow your lead though going forward.

Vaslo• 6 years ago

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.

gcatalfamo• 6 years ago

It’s not functions for me, you can create them and I adore google sheet for its versatility. But SPEED is the true problem. Whatever non-trivial you do, it becomes devastatingly slow.

nine_k• 6 years ago

That's where webassembly could really shine.

Naac• 6 years ago

Can you list some specific examples?

singron• 6 years ago

Joel Spolsky has some examples in his talk about excel: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c).

I particularly wish Google sheets had the tables feature.

pradn• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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

bradknowles• 6 years ago

But there's probably at least one critical person in each of those buildings who uses PhotoShop.

So, you can't just get rid of PhotoShop, any more than you can just get rid of Excel.

epanchin• 6 years ago

A bit of a red herring but I’m not overly familiar with google sheets, I use Excel. A problem I have is others can edit formula on NFS shared documents without it being clear what’s changed.

In my mind, collaborative software is like git, with a clear commit history.

Is google sheets that collaborative? Or do you need to trust the people you share it with?

zonidjan• 6 years ago

"All the functions" - I guarantee you that almost any function you want in Excel is in Sheets. Just because you don't know how to use it or find it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The only reason you know how to use Excel better is that you have past experience with it. That's, effectively, the sunken cost fallacy.

"size" - what?

"some of the external tools" - duh? But what on earth are using using "external tools" integrated to Excel for?

mrosett• 6 years ago

The integrations in Excel are actually very important for power users. There's a reason Thinkcell can charge a couple hundred dollars per user.

tlarkworthy• 6 years ago

But what on earth are using using "external tools" integrated to Excel for?

Off the top of my head: Operation Research... i.e. serious calculations to decide where to spend a lot of money, like: Where should I build my power station? I know, for this I will get my mixed integer programming suite out. Where is that in Google sheets???

// note, I adore Sheets, but it definitely definitely cannot compete with excel for serious computation suites or even modest visualisations.

crazygringo• 6 years ago

I believe Sheets contains virtually all Excel functions, and while Excel supports 1M rows, Sheets supports 5M cells, so they can both outperform each other in size depending on how many columns you have.

But yes, add-on tools are going to be platform-dependent in both directions.

kevas• 6 years ago

Actually, in Excel, you can have unlimited rows by using power query.

kartayyar• 6 years ago

I think they are different tools:

Sheets -> Great collaborative experience for simple to moderate complexity use cases.

Excel -> The heavy artillery.

drdeadringer• 6 years ago

I could be described as a "Microsoft Hater" and I still prefer Excel over Google Sheets.

The trade-off of functionality and general control isn't worth for the "Share! Collaborate! Contribute!" hype.

"For what I use it for" I guess, but after going full Linux I've been on LibreOffice [or similar] alternatives. Just not Google Sheets if I can ever, ever help it.

davchana• 6 years ago

I was a heavy user of Excel for my personal life, finances, tracking, todo, everything for about 6 years because it was installed on my work computer. My timekeeping work was also 99% Excel sheets. My personal sheets were always on a USB Disk.

Now I moved to US & do not have dedicated desk, & strictly not allowed to plug anything in work pc, fireable offense. So I am back to use Google Sheets because I can access those at my phone, & Sheets is not the same. Maybe 50%, but many simple things in Excel are difficult in Sheets. The most being Calculate Formula button in Excel.

rossdavidh2• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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

rossdavidh2• 6 years ago

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

randomsearch• 6 years ago

Something I think about all the time: “what is the spreadsheet equivalent for this domain?”

Google Sheets was down

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