Google Drive joins growing list of cloud services hit by outages

Google's cloud storage service was hit by a two hour long outage, with the unexplained interruption disrupting services for thousands of users.

Drive was hit by the outage in the early morning US time. It comes on the heels of a similar outage by its Microsoft cloud storage counterpart earlier this month.

"We apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support," wrote Google on its Drive status page.

"Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better."

Google announced that it was investigating a potential outage at 7:17 AM PST. By around 8 AM PST, the firm reported that the issue was being resolved and the service should be back online within the hour.

V3 has contacted Google for clarification on what caused the outage and will update this story when details are released.

Google Drive is the search giants cloud storage service. The product was recently updated to offer users the ability to preview 30 different types of files without opening them directly.

Drive is in direct competition with Microsoft's cloud storage service SkyDrive. Redmond's service also was recently hit with an outage earlier this month, caused by an overheating datacentre.

Twitter and Amazon were also taken offline by outages in the early months of 2013. Amazon's US e-commerce homepage was down for about an hour. Twitter's outage lasted about three hours. Both outages occurred on the same day in late January.