As soon as Google users in the US experienced a widespread service disruption on Thursday evening, the search engine giant shared a brief technical explanation of what happened.
"As has been noticed, several Google services were down for some users from 6:00 to 6:23 p.m. PDT. A pool of servers that route traffic to application backends crashed and users on that particular pool experienced the outage. GCP was not affected," the company said in a statement.
Several Google and YouTube services were impacted by an approximately 20-minute outage.
The outages seemed to be focused around the US east coast, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks internet disruptions.
The Downdetector heat maps for Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive and other Google services showed a significant number of people having trouble accessing those websites.
"Never thought I'd reach a point in my life where Gmail and Drive being down would give me this level of anxiety. This is peak adulthood," a user said in a tweet.
"Personally I love it when Google Classroom goes down just at the moment when my kids are trying to upload their homework, so everyone freaks out and screams at me when I can't fix it," said another user.
In addition, the outages seemed to affect corporate customers of Google's cloud computing service.
