Google and many of its services suffered an outage this morning, causing a ripple of frustration and confusion to show up on Twitter.
Google's free, cloud-based email service, Gmail, along with Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets were among the services that were down for about 40 minutes this morning, according to Google's Status Dashboard.
The company first reported the problem at 9:58 a.m. EDT, noting, "We're investigating reports of an issue... We will provide more information shortly."
Then at 10:40 a.m., Google's reported that the problem had been resolved.
"We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support," the company wrote. "Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better."
Google has not yet replied to a request for information on what caused the outage and what was done to bring the systems back up.
The morning outage wasn't lost on users who depend on services like Gmail and Google Docs, not just for personal use but for business use, as well. And they turned to Twitter to make sure they weren't the only ones without access and to vent their frustrations.
"#Gmail being down has brought my productivity this morning to a complete halt," tweeted @whitnevgladden.
And @TheXclass tweeted, "Which one of you hackers stole the cloud???!!!! #GmailDown #DownGoesGoogle."
Others used the opportunity to poke some fun at Google, and even the government.
"If you listen carefully, you can hear the screams of anguish as people realize that yes... #gmail is down. "nobodypanic," tweeted @hdboothe .
And @averagesecguy tweeted, "Google and Gmail are down for me. Is the NSA doing an upgrade?"
This article, Google outage briefly takes down Gmail, Docs, Calendar, was originally published at Computerworld.com.
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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