According to IDG News Service, last week “Google Drive, the cloud storage and applications suite used by millions at home and at work, has suffered three service interruptions this week, making it impossible at times for affected users to access their files and applications.”

According to the Google Apps Status site, the first incident happened last week on Monday, and was an outage that lasted about three hours and affected 33 percent of Google Drive users.  Those affected saw error messages or performance problems.

According to Google, a bug in the Google network’s control software triggered this problem.  This software shifts traffic over to unaffected network connections and servers.  Unfortunately, the traffic load-balancing increased latency in the servers and caused another problem with the software that manages Drive user connections and sessions.

Most of those using Google Drive are small businesses and don’t pay much for the service, or they get it for free.  These types of problems are going to pop up now and then.  For the most part, they are quickly corrected and don’t cause users to suffer data loss or lose much productivity.

However, if these sorts of service disruptions continue, then it calls into question the reliability of the service provider, in this case, Google.  To be fair, other providers that offer free or low cost cloud storage solutions have also suffered disruptions.