Google LLC has picked itself up and dusted itself off after four-hour cloud outage that took several of its main internet services offline on Sunday.

The outage began at around 12.20 p.m. PDT when services including Gmail, YouTube and G Suite as well as outside services became inaccessible to thousands of users. Google later blamed the problem on “network congestion.”

The main impact was felt on the east coast of the U.S., where users reported extremely slow connections or the inability to access most Google services. Other services hosted on Google Cloud, such as Snapchat and Nest, were also reportedly unavailable during the outage.

It took that long for Google’s engineers to get everything back on track, the company said.

“The network congestion issue affecting Google Cloud, G Suite, and YouTube is resolved for the vast majority of users, and we expect a full resolution in the near future,” Google’s engineering team said in an update.

The outage wasn’t limited to the U.S., however, as digital experience monitoring company ThousandEyes revealed in a series of visualizations (pictured) that the effects were felt across the globe.

Starting between 12-12:15pm PT ThousandEyes detected a global outage in @GCPcloud that is currently ongoing. At this time we can simply confirm the large scale nature of the outage. #gcpdown pic.twitter.com/8Y2jsQNQi7

— ThousandEyes (@thousandeyes) June 2, 2019

It’s believed the problem has something to do with Google’s core network, since the congestion apparently affected the majority of its services, including its cloud hosting and compute platforms, as well as its consumer services.

In this path visualization view, we see all traffic dropping at the edge of Google’s network. #googledown #gcpdown pic.twitter.com/ur6Yd3vY6S

— ThousandEyes (@thousandeyes) June 2, 2019

ThousandEyes later confirmed to SiliconANGLE via email that network congestion was the most likely root cause of the outage as it first started seeing “elevated packet loss” in Google’s network as early as 12 p.m. PDT.

“These issues started to impact users globally approximately 20 minutes prior to their public announcement of the issue, showing an early indication of what was to come,” ThousandEyes said.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE he wasn’t surprised that Google was blaming network issues for its latest outage, since this is usually the case when such problems occur. But regardless of the cause of the problem, today’s outage does appear to prove Google’s assertion that it doesn’t prioritize between its own and its customers workloads.

“The data point we can take away from this is that Google’s load and its customer’s loads are treated definitively equally, because both its own services, such as YouTube, and other services such as Snapchat, a Google Cloud customer, were down,” Mueller said.

The outage now appears to have been fully resolved, though we’re still awaiting an official postmortem from Google on exactly what went wrong.

Image: ThousandEyes