Google
Google Drive went down Friday afternoon. The company said it's investigating the glitch. Dado Ruvic/Reuters

Reporters, students and workers around the world panicked as Google Drive, the search giant's cloud storage system for documents and other media files, went down for some users Friday afternoon. The recently renamed Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) reported that the company is aware of the issues.

Google's app status page reads, "We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Drive. We will provide more information shortly."

The crash appears to have begun shortly before 3 p.m. EDT, as Venture Beat first reported error messages on Google Docs. The message, for some users, reads, "Trying to connect. To edit offline, turn on offline sync when you reconnect." As noted, Google users could still access their files in offline mode if they had already turned on that setting.

Even on a Friday afternoon, Google Drive users threw their hands up -- or more likely took to Twitter to air their frustrations at being unable to access the tool:

In the cause of improving Internet use and speed, Google announced this week that it's working to make mobile Web browsing faster through an initiative called "Accelerated Mobile Pages."