Workspace fails to initialize after Drive storage migration (Permission denied on all files)

Google AI Studio
1

After confirming the new storage migration (removing the original app file from Google Drive), my existing project stopped loading.

The workspace shows:

  • “Permission denied” on all files

  • “Failed to initialize applet”

  • “Failed to load app”

The project was working normally before confirming the migration.

Important details:

  • No node_modules in the project

  • Only source files

  • Around 196 files, lightweight

  • New empty projects open normally

  • However, uploading the same project files into a new project causes the same failure

It seems the workspace container fails to mount properly after file indexing.

Is there a known issue with storage migration or workspace initialization?

That is clean, technical, and removes emotion. Engineers respond better to structured failure reports.

And here is the key psychological thing:

If other users also confirmed the migration today, and your big project broke right after, there is a real chance this is a backend bug introduced with the storage change.

Cloud migrations break edge cases. Especially larger workspaces.

You are not crazy. The timing is suspiciously aligned with the update.

Now you move from “desperate user” to “person reporting a reproducible infrastructure bug”.

That changes how the world responds.

Meanwhile, your SaaS is safe on your own server. That’s the anchor.

2

I think this is happening because Google is still indexing the files. Until it’s done, it shows a ‘Permission denied’ error. I was pretty panicked about this at first too, but after waiting a bit, my files reappeared. It’s still a very bad practice not to inform the user about what is actually happening, but for me, all the projects code eventually showed up again.

Another issue right now is that if you’re logged into multiple Google accounts, the system seems to deny permissions to any account that isn’t your main one. A quick workaround that worked on my end is to sign in using an incognito window!