By Amira Benjamin, Shaaranki Kulenthirarasa and Edward Lander

Access to Google Workspace for students, faculty and staff across Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) has been restored after an outage resulting from the university exceeding its 1.08 petabyte storage limit around 1 p.m.

This outage led to Google Suite applications removing editing access for students. 

Anyone with a torontomu.ca email could not edit or create new files in their Google Drive, nor could anyone make suggestions to existing files. This includes files in Docs, Slides, Forms, Sheets and all other programs in Google Suite.

In an email sent to students and staff at 3:11 p.m. the university said they were aware of the issue and Computing and Communications Services (CCS) were working to resolve it.

“At this time, no other services (for example, D2L Brightspace) are impacted,” the email read.

Marc Bautista, a second-year computer engineering student said the outage interrupted his studies. “I was working on one [assignment] and just as I was trying to switch to another one, I couldn’t open anything,” he said. “It was so frustrating, I was like ‘am I crazy? Is it my fault?’”

“It’s rough because I have like three assignments I have to do,” he added.

Nesreen Albar, a second-year medical physics student said she has a group project worth 30 per cent of her grade due tonight and she’s worried the outage will impact her ability to complete it.

“It’s making me feel frustrated. I’m kind of crashing out because of it,” she said.

In 2021, Google announced they would end unlimited storage for educational institutions. The storage quotas came into effect for students October 2023.

According to TMU’s website, each TMU student has up to 1 terabyte (TB) of storage on their student Google workspace accounts. This is sufficient for approximately 6.5 million document pages, 250,000 photos taken with a 12 MP camera or 500 hours of video. 

Existing files are still accessible in Google Drive. According to Google Workspace, there are no reported disruptions or outages affecting Google Suite applications.

Students and staff are still able to send and receive emails. 

With files from Ava Whelpley.

This story was updated at 4:34 p.m. on March 27, 2026