Gmail users reported widespread outages for about an hour Friday afternoon, leading to short-lived panic and many bad jokes on Twitter.
The free Google email service seemed to go out around 2 p.m. EST. Users from Canada, the U.S., Europe and India expressed their displeasure on Twitter, which continued to function.
Of course, there may have been an upside to the temporary outage. It did give anyone who uses the service as their primary work email time to take a coffee break, or time to look at some cute animal pictures.
#Gmail is down? DON'T PANIC. Here's a puppy to get you through: pic.twitter.com/xgfy332qfc
— Late Night (@LateNightJimmy) January 24, 2014
Service was restored less than an hour after the first outages.
But not before Yahoo could get a passive-aggressive dig in.
Gmail is temporarily unavailable pic.twitter.com/KLNxcQ9zUP
— Yahoo (@Yahoo) January 24, 2014
As noted at Tech Crunch, four members of the Google Site Reliability Engineering—the people who keep Google services running—were doing an AMA on Reddit at the time of the service outage.
There is no word from Google on what cause the outage.