Google apologized yesterday for what it called a traffic jam that resulted in slow service on its web properties, or even causing the site to go down.

The outage, which lasted nearly two hours, prompted a wave of distress and frustration among users, emphasizing just how dependent they are on the Internet giant's services.

YouTube, Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Maps, Google Docs, AdSense and Blogger users were the most affected by the outage this time.

An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our traffic through Asia, said Urs Hoelzle, a spokesman for the company.

As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions, he said. We've been working hard to make our services ultrafast and 'always on', so it's especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens.

Users of Twitter used the micro blogging platform as a way to get their opinion out there.

Napolebsis tweeted The Google outage endorses my recent decision to move some services back to offline apps.

While k_sasha tweeted Sympathies to the Google servers. Happens to everyone. But this is why the world needs more than one search engine.

This is not the first time that Google has had technical problems.

In February 2009, Google's Gmail service experienced a breakdown leaving millions of people worldwide without access to the free web-based e-mail service for a few hours.

Google Twitter