Google+, Gmail went down worldwide while reliability team was taking questions

Google's Gmail service and social network Google+ reportedly faced a worldwide outage following a technical error that was fixed in roughly 50 minutes.

The two services went down at the same time when the site's engineers responsible for keeping it alive 24x7 sat down to answer questions on Reddit's AMA.

According to Tech Crunch, only four members of the reliability team took part in the AMA session (Ask Me Anything) and weirdly the servers went down the same time with users wondering if Google employed only a handful of experts to manage the site's many millions of servers.

Despite the humour element in the entire episode of perfect or rather imperfect timings of the glitch and the AMA session, the Gmail service and Google+ were restored in a short time.

The widespread outage affected users in Europe, the US, Canada and India, who reported seeing 500 code problem, indicating it to be a temporary glitch.

The report said that the Google+ outage also affected YouTube comments under the new system, as well as Hangouts across the web and mobile.

Meanwhile, Google's Apps Status Dashboard called it a "disruption" in its Gmail service and promised 'more information shortly' and after approximately 20 minutes the service briefly came back online for most users, but then went down again before being restored fully in just under an hour.