Two days after making landfall, Hurricane Sandy is still causing consternation -- this time, among Gmail users nationwide. The ripple effect the storm has had on communication services briefly took down several popular Google products -- including Gmail, Google Chat, Google Hangout, Google Drive and Google Reader -- on Wednesday evening for users from New York to Los Angeles.
"We believe about 10% of our users experienced difficulties reaching Google for six minutes this afternoon," the company said in an official statement. "We apologize to everyone affected and have worked hard to get our services back to normal as quickly as possible."
What the official statement doesn't say is that Google customer service representatives are telling those who call that some users were briefly unable to access Gmail and other services around 6 p.m. ET because their Internet connections were being routed through computers in the New York area, the Huffington Post has learned. Google told concerned customers that hiccups could happen again during the next few days, but the company is working to prevent it.
The company also told users that no data was lost during the outage because the issue was a failure to connect devices to servers.
Though Gmail was down for just several minutes, workers who depend on it and other Google products to do their work complained -- loudly -- that they were unable access their emails.
"Gmail down. Pack it in, people," Talking Points Memo editor Igor Bobic tweeted.
Fox News commentator Andy Levy joked "making note of the ppl who freaked out when gmail was down for 3 minutes so i know not to count on them during the zombie apocalypse."
A similar freakout on Twitter occurred in April of this year when only 2 percent of users could not access their Gmails, according to the company.
The outage came on the same day Google unveiled a new "Compose" feature that lets people write one email and read another at the same time.