That February outage came just a week after that some users had experienced problems getting results from Google News searches over a span of more than 14 hours. Some users reported that they weren't getting any results when searching for keywords, such as Microsoft and even Google, in Google News. Other users reported that entire news sections, such as Science/Technology, were coming up empty of stories.

And last December, that there was a technical problem with and the Web-based Gmail chat system. One day early in the month, messages created by a "subset" of users were left unsent because of glitches in the messaging system, according to Google spokesman Andrew Kovacs.