Brief outage affects Gmail, other apps

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Several media outlets reported Friday a brief outage at Google kept many users from using Gmail.

Several media outlets reported Friday a brief outage at Google kept many users from using Gmail.

According to The Washington Post, the worst of the outage lasted about 10 minutes, though services remained unstable for about an hour. The outage happened close to 2 p.m. on the East Coast, and NBC reported Gmail and Google+ were back online for most by about 2:52 p.m. EST.

NBC also said reports of the outage came from across the United States, as well as Europe and Canada. Google+, Drive, Hangouts and YouTube were also experience connection issues.

Those trying to access their accounts were greeted with an error message from Google saying the accounts were temporarily unavailable, according to The Post. The company’s Apps Status Dashboard initially showed no disruptions for any Google services, but was later updated to show problems with Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Drive, Google Groups and other services, The Post said.

All services on the Google Dashboard were working as intended, The Post reported, by about 4 p.m. EST on Friday afternoon.

NBC reported that at 3:23 p.m., Google noted via the Dashboard: “The problem with Gmail should be resolved. 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.”

NBC also reported Google was investigating what caused the outage.