Google services were disrupted, including search, Web page crawling & indexing and cloud-hosting services, following an internet diversion that rerouted data traffic through Russia and China. Users faced the problem on Monday and it continued till Tuesday as well. According to an AP report, the service interruptions lasted for nearly two hours.

Google confirmed Monday’s disruption on a network status page but said only that it believed the cause was “external to Google .” On November 12, Google issued an official statement - "Connectivity issues connecting to Google services including Google APIs, Load balancers, instances and other external IP addresses." followed by another message - "We've received a report of an issue, with Google Cloud Networking as of Monday, 2018-11-12 14:16 US/Pacific. We have reports of Google Cloud IP addresses being erroneously advertised by internet service providers other than Google. We will provide more information by Monday, 2018-11-12 15:00 US/Pacific."

People faced inconvenience and tweeted about the matter

The method is also formally known as border gateway protocol hijacking, it can knock essential services offline and enable espionage and financial theft. It can arise either from misconfiguration — human error, essentially— or from a malicious action.

Later on, Monday Google informed their users that issue is resolved and an investigation is underway, the search giant quoted "The issue with Google Cloud IP addresses being erroneously advertised by internet service providers other than Google has been resolved for all affected users as of 14:35 US/Pacific. Throughout the duration of this issue, Google services were operating as expected and we believe the root cause of the issue was external to Google. We will conduct an internal investigation of this issue and make appropriate improvements to our systems to help prevent or minimize future recurrence."

This is how users reacted when the search engine was down:

According to Alex Henthorn-Iwane, an executive at ThousandEyes, he called Monday's incident the worst affecting Google that his company has witnessed.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Nov 13, 2018 11:45 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).