[jganetsk]

I am an engineer for Google Docs. When they say that Docs List is down, they just mean Docs List. It is stated so on the dashboard site.

"Affected users will see a 404 when accessing the Google Docs home page. You can access individual documents by clicking on the link in the original sharing email, or if you have saved the URL for that document."

All your docs are still accessible.

[rachelbythebay]

Your docs are accessible, but you can't get the list, huh?

Have you ever heard the joke where the pilot is lost in the fog and yells out "where am I?" to someone on the ground, and they yell back "you're in an airplane"? The pilot goes "ah!" and manages to land successfully despite the fog.

Later, at the bar, friends ask how he managed to land it given that response. He just said he got an answer which was totally technically correct and yet completely useless. He figured he must have been over the <company> campus and set course for the airfield based on that.

Do you think people really care that it's the list which is actually out when the impact is probably the same? You might be technically correct, but it's totally useless, too.

The thing is, when I heard that joke the first time many years ago, the <company> given was Microsoft. I think there's a new contender for that spot now.

[jganetsk]

Ways you can get to a doc without the list:

- Bookmarks

- Recently Visited

- E-mail (which are automatically generated on sharing)

- It could already be open in a browser tab, either on your computer, or someone else's (and a friendly copy+paste of a URL can fix that)

There is clearly a big difference between "totally useless" and this state of affairs. And it's of great value for users to know this. But thanks for your FUD.

[ericleeclark]

Good suggestions, thanks.

[ericleeclark]

Right, I understand that. But when you have thousands of docs, most of which you haven't shared (works in progress), no one is going to have the link readily available. So it's essentially a complete outage from the average users standpoint.

Don't get me wrong, huge fan of Google Apps. Just becomes a big issue for clients when they can't access their data, even if it's just minutes -- as you well know.

[jganetsk]

As has been publicly reported: offline support is coming back.

This will mitigate the issue of outages to some extent.