Google has blamed a system error for a network disruption which it said affected 14% of users yesterday.
The error caused Google to direct a large portion of its traffic through Asia, causing slow services and, in some cases, network interruptions, Google said on its company blog.
Service disruptions lasted for around an hour in the morning US Pacific time, reportedly affecting services including the search page, Google News, Gmail and Google Apps.
The problem has since been resolved, Google's SVP of Operations Urs Hoelzle said. “We're very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we'll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won't happen again,” he added.
Google's network problem was one of the most posted-about topics on Twitter during the disruption, the New York Times said.