Google has confirmed outages and slowness impacting users of its Google Drive service in Australia and New Zealand.
• Wed, 19 Aug 2026 • Tech
According to a post on its Workspace website, Google said that the incident began at 2:59PM AEST, and is now investigating.
“Our engineering team is currently working on a potential fix while continuing to investigate the full root cause,” the statement reads.
You’re out of free articles for this month
To continue reading the rest of this article, please log in.
“We will provide an update by Wednesday, 2026-08-19 00:30 PDT (5:30 PM AEST) with current details.”
Currently, those impacted are experiencing slowness when using the service, with a workaround not currently available.
According to DownDetector, reports of outages peaked at 1:08 PM with 985 reports, with levels remaining consistently high. The latest reading at the time of writing (2:53 PM) read 738 reports.
62 per cent of reports flagged website issues, with 21 per cent noting app issues and 10 per cent having trouble logging in.
A number of users also mentioned a 502 error, which means an invalid response from the website server, suggesting the issue may be with Google Drive’s backend.
Google Australia has not provided any additional details of the incident beyond the initial Google post. A deadline for the issue to be fixed has not currently been set.
Aussies unable to pay over the weekend.
The Google Drive outage closely follows an outage with Mastercard on Saturday, most prominently felt by Aussie consumers.
“A scheduled system update caused Mastercard transactions to be declined for a period of time earlier today,” Mastercard told several media outlets on Saturday.
The payment provider did not disclose how long the outage lasted, but it did confirm that ATMs remained operational and that the issue had since been resolved.
“The situation has been resolved, and all systems are working as normal,” the company said in the same statement.
Want to see more stories from trusted news sources?
Make Cyber Daily a preferred news source on Google.
Daniel Croft
Author
Born in the heart of Western Sydney, Daniel Croft is a passionate journalist with an understanding for and experience writing in the technology space. Having studied at Macquarie University, he joined Momentum Media in 2022, writing across a number of publications including Australian Aviation, Cyber Security Connect and Defence Connect. Outside of writing, Daniel has a keen interest in music, and spends his time playing in bands around Sydney.