The company reported that the outage, which started a little before 11 a.m. EDT, caused about to face slow service or interruptions. The problem affected all Google products, including Google Search, Google News, Gmail, Google Maps and Google Reader.

The outage appeared to start clearing up a little after noon EDT.

"We've been working hard to make our services ultrafast and 'always on', so it's especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens," wrote Urs Hoelzle, Google senior vice president of Operations in a blog post. "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."

Hoelzle explained that the system error directed some of their web traffic through Asia, creating the hangups and interruptions.

"Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia," he wrote. "And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That's basically what happened to some of our users today."