Periodic outages for services such as Gmail, Google News and YouTube were experienced by users in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Australia, France, China and elsewhere, according to reports. Loading Google's home page also was sluggish for some, users reported via Twitter and other non-Google communication services.
Google confirmed an "issue affecting some Google services," saying it had "been resolved" and that the company would "share more details soon." A spokesperson gave more specific details about the disruption to its Google News aggregator.
"Earlier today, Google News was temporarily unavailable for many users from approximately 3:30 a.m. until around 7 a.m. Pacific Time. This issue has now been resolved," the Mountain View, Calif.-based company said in a statement e-mailed to Channelweb.com. "We know how important Google News is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously. We apologize to those users who were affected."
Some San Francisco users reported having problems loading Google News as late as about 9 a.m., but the service appeared to be fully back online shortly thereafter.
An AT&T spokesperson said the company had looked into the matter and hadn't found any problems on its end.
"After receiving speculative reports in the media that Google experienced an outage related to the AT&T network, we looked into the matter. We have not identified any specific problems in our network that could have caused the reported outage," an AT&T spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement.
There also was speculation that the introduction of YouTube videos embedded in Google News story clusters may have caused problems with the delivery of that service, though the YouTube embeds first appeared in some story clusters Wednesday without an apparent hitch.
The list of Google services that were reportedly down for various periods of time Thursday includes YouTube, Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Maps, Google Docs, AdSense and Blogger.
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