Google Gmail and Drive Service Goes Down

I've often wondered what would happen if Google day decided to call it quits and pulled the plug on all of its services. Could you imagine what kind of disruption that would cause? The truth is, many of us have come to rely pretty heavily on Google's services, so even just simple (and temporary) outages sometimes hit users hard.

Users on several continents got a taste of what's that like on Monday when Google suffered "service disruptions" affecting Gmail and Google Drive, Reuters reports. Both had gone dark for a period of time, though it's unclear exactly how many users were affected.

War of the Worlds Set
What it would look like if Google suddenly shut down its services.

"We are currently experience an issue with some Google services," Google spokeswoman Andrea Freund said in a statement. "For everyone who is affected, we apologize for any inconvenience you may be experiencing."

The services were down for at least two hours in some locations, though it doesn't appear foul play (like a Denial of Service attack) was the culprit. Instead, Google engineer Tim Steele posted in a support forum that it was a "server-side problem."