Google+ suffers outage Friday morning

Computerworld - Google+ suffered a site outage Friday morning, prompting users of the social network to complain on both Google+ and Twitter that the site was down or slow to load.

According to Google, the outage was over by late morning, East Coast time.

"The issue should be resolved," wrote a Google spokeswoman in an email to Computerworld. "We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better."

Google did not say how widespread the outage was or what caused the problem.

Users reported receiving a 503 internal server error or had to deal with slow uploads. They also reported that the trouble lasted for varying amounts of time -- anywhere from five to 20 minutes.

This past December, Vic Gundotra, a senior vice president for Google+, said in a blog post that Google+ was the "fastest growing network thingy ever," adding that the number of Google+ active users increased 35% in three months.

The social network, which is about a year and a half old, had 135 million active users that month.

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at  @sgaudin, on Google+, or subscribe to Sharon's RSS feed . Her email address is sgaudin@computerworld.com.

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