Sunita Somvanshi
Estimated reading time: 1 minutes
Google has confirmed an outage affecting Google Drive users in Australia and New Zealand on 19 August 2026, with users reporting slowness, 502 errors, and an inability to load files.
According to a post on the Google Workspace Status page, the incident began at 2.59pm AEST. “Our engineering team is currently working on a potential fix while continuing to investigate the full root cause,” Google said. The company promised an update by 00.30 PDT, or 5.30pm AEST.
Downdetector data showed reports of outages peaking at 1.08pm with 985 reports, remaining high through the afternoon. At 3.30pm, 522 users were still reporting problems. Sixty-two per cent of reports flagged website issues, 21 per cent noted app issues, and 10 per cent had trouble logging in. Multiple users mentioned a 502 error, which indicates an invalid response from a server.
One user commented on Downdetector: “Grrr it is SO slow this morning – I can’t load ANYTHING on Drive.” Another said: “Files are taking more than 6 minutes to load on Google Drive for Windows. 10+ devices impacted in our office.”
Google Australia had not provided additional details beyond the initial post. No deadline for resolution had been set at the time of writing.
The outage follows a Mastercard outage on 15 August 2026 that disrupted Australian transactions. Both incidents highlight dependence on cloud infrastructure for daily work.
