Google Drive rolled out a hard file limit with no warning

Update (October 2026): Google scrapped the 5-million-item cap on 3 April 2023, more than two weeks before this article was published, after the backlash that followed Ars Technica's report. Google said the limit had been introduced to preserve stability and performance, that it would explore alternative approaches, and that it would tell users about any such changes in advance.

The limit started appearing in February, and one Reddit user reported waking up to the message: “Please delete 2 million files to continue using your Google Drive account”. According to posts on the Google Drive API issue tracker, the original error read: “The limit for the number of items, whether trashed or not, created by this account has been exceeded.” Around March, the message changed to “Error 403: this account has exceeded the creation limit of 5 million items. To create more items, move items to the trash and delete them forever”. Affected users could no longer add new files to their Drive accounts, and some users confirmed sending a message to Google customer service reporting the problem.

Google didn't make any official statement before embarking on this leaving many users in the dark. Google charged $150 per month for 30TB of storage for a Google One subscription and promised to offer unlimited space for an enterprise plan. The 5 million file limit affected both consumer and business account holders, and users with many small files could hit it long before filling the storage they were paying for.

Google added to Ars Technica reports that the limit applies to how many items one can create in any Drive, not a total number for all files in a drive. For individual users, that's not a distinction that matters, but it could matter if you share storage with several accounts. While this was conceived as a good move by Google, it undermines the importance of its customers, who were left uninformed before taking the decision.