Some of Google’s services had a hard time waking up yesterday morning, with hundreds of users reporting 502 error messages whenever they tried to login to Gmail, Google Apps, and in some cases, tried to open the Chrome web browser.

Naturally, as is the usual recourse for angry netizens these days, dozens of users took to Twitter to vent their frustrations at Google, with some pretty humorous responses among them.

Google says that the problems were due to a global service disruption, which meant that Gmail was inaccessible for thousands of users for a good couple of hours on Monday morning. In addition, the disruption extended to Google Chrome, which was reported to be crashing with alarming regularity by many users.

By early afternoon it looked as if Google had managed to steady its ship, with most users reporting that services were back online. Even so, the problems can’t have done much for Google’s prestige in light of its recent decision to end free access to its cloud-based business apps and force new users to pay $50 a year for the privilege of using them. Google has been pushing its business services heavily in recent months in spite of its decision to start charging people for them, but while it’s hard to contend with the convenience that cloud-based apps and services provide, outages such as yesterday’s only serve to highlight their disadvantages — businesses can be left totally crippled in these instances, which occur more often than most people realize.

Twitter witnessed a flurry of activity within minutes of Gmail going down, with dozens of angry messages illustrating the annoyance felt by most users:

“C’mon @gmail, you’re not supposed to crash! Can’t get my work done! Error 502??,” tweeted Blairez.

Meanwhile, others were panicking that they wouldn’t be able to get any work done:

“Negative productivity while GMail is down and causing Chrome to crash every few minutes,” vented Kyle Judah of educational startup RecoVend.

We should point out that there was never a total outage, as dozens of users reported that everything was working fine during the disruption, whilst others said that they could access Gmail via other browsers or their smartphones.