You can all relax now. The near-unprecedented outage that seemingly affected all of Google’s services for a brief time on Friday is over.
The event began at approximately 4:37pm Pacific Time and lasted between one and five minutes, according to the Google Apps Dashboard. All of the Google Apps services reported being back online by 4:48pm.
The incident apparently blacked out every service Mountain View has to offer simultaneously, from Google Search to Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, and beyond.
Big deal, right? Everyone has technical difficulties every once in a while. It goes with the territory.
Even the hardened tech veterans here at Vulture Annex in San Francisco had trouble figuring out what to do during the outage. One stalwart reporter announced that he would try using Bing, at which brows were furrowed. Another asked the question that was doubtless echoed all across the West Coast: "Can we go home, then?"
Fortunately for all of us, everything seemed to come back online minutes later. But exactly how an operation like Google’s can even go dark like that, all at once, is anybody’s guess.
The Register contacted the folks in Mountain View to see if they can account for the outage, but a spokesperson only directed us to the aforementioned dashboard. We’ll fill you in with any further information as it emerges.