Google Calendar Disruption Enters Fourth Day

Google Calendar, part of Google Apps, has been experiencing intermittent problems since Tuesday, October 5th, and users are getting frustrated.

"I use Google Calendar to keep my second grade classroom on track," wrote a user posting in the Google Calendar help forum under the name justinmay2000. "All of my lesson plans are stored in this calendar and [I] share my plans with my colleagues. ...This system worked flawlessly for six weeks, but yesterday the contents of one of my calendars went missing ... PLEASE HELP me and my second graders."

A help forum thread about Calendar problems has grown to include 435 replies at the time this article was filed.

In a response to complaints on Friday morning, a Google employee identified only as Adrienne121 said that the company understands what went wrong and has successfully restored some users' calendars.

She said that Google expects to be able to continue restore inaccessible Calendar data without any permanent loss of information.

Reprinting an explanation posted on the Google Apps Status Dashboard, she said that the issue does not affect primary user calendars and that secondary calendars have been affected for less than 0.1% of users.

That would be at most 30,000 users, if it could be assumed that all 30 million Google Apps users were counted as Calendar users. The actual number is likely to be significantly fewer.

"We're sorry for the inconvenience, and are working to fix this asap," the note says. "Calendars are being restored every hour, and we expect to have everything back to normal today (PDT)."

A Google spokesperson said she hadn't heard of any enterprise Google Apps accounts that had been affected.

Google Calendar's last reported problem occurred on September 23rd and affected less than 0.05% of users during a period of about three hours.