Something very strange is going on with Google this morning. Most Google-related services appear to be either down or barely functioning as of Thursday morning.

Even the google.com home page is barely loading, if at all, for many users. Gmail, Google Reader, Google News, and most every other common Google application seems to be suffering similarly.

A quick poll on Twitter confirmed I’m far from the only one experiencing this seemingly widespread outage. I’ve placed calls, e-mails, and tweets to try to get some answers as to what’s happening. If and when I hear anything, I’ll pass it along here.

The SANS Internet Storm Center now reports the Google-wide outage has been going on for about an hour, since about 10:45 EDT.

Update: Massive discussion going on via Twitter: #googlefail and gmailfail.

Update: Google services seem to be (more or less) back online as of about 12:20 p.m. ET. No official word on a cause yet. There’s some speculation via Twitter that the issue may be specific to AT&T Internet customers, though that information has not been confirmed.

Update: Google is “looking into” the issues and promising a full update sometime soon (via the first official statement). Everything appears to be back to normal at this point.

Gmail Outage: The Latest

Google says the Gmail problem is now fully resolved, though you may have to fill in a CAPTCHA box before being able to access your account once again. As for what actually happened, Google doesn’t have a whole lot of answers just yet.

“We know that for many of you this disrupted your working day. We’re really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could,” writes Acacio Cruz, Gmail site reliability manager. “Our priority was to get you back up and running. Our engineers are still investigating the root cause of the problem.”

Cruz went on to say that he wanted to “stress that this [was] an unusual occurrence.”

Gmail previously suffered a significant outage about six months ago, in August of 2008.