Google blamed "high levels of network congestion" in the East for outages affecting YouTube, GMail, Google Voice, Calendar and many other services.
ADVERTISEMENTGoogle Inc. reported that GMail, Google Calendar and nearly all its of other consumer-facing services were experiencing major service problems after reports of outages flooded in from users around the country.
"We continue to experience high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA, affecting multiple services in Google Cloud, G Suite and YouTube," Google said at 6 p.m. ET.
"Users may see slow performance or intermittent errors," it said. "Our engineering teams have completed the first phase of their mitigation work and are currently implementing the second phase, after which we expect to return to normal service."
Google gave no timetable for when service was expected to be fully restored.
Services that monitor connectivity of major websites began reporting widespread outages of a host of Google services at about 3 p.m., most of them in the eastern half of the country. Google status pages showed that two of the company's major internal backbone engines, Cloud Service and Compute Engine, were "reporting issues."
In addition to GMail and Calendar, affected services included Google Drive and its related editing and presentation tools, like Docs and Sheets, Hangouts, Keep, Tasks and Voice.
The reports began surfacing at about the same time that Level 3 Communications, a prominent provider of internet services in 46 states and much of South America, was experiencing similar problems, also primarily in the eastern half of the country.
Level 3's clients include Google, but it couldn't immediately determined whether the two incidents were related.