Gmail, Snapchat and Nest restored after brief outage

The outage led to emails failing to be delivered at Gmail, and some security cameras hooked up to Nest temporarily failing to record footage. It also took out Snapchat completely, for more than an hour, on Wednesday afternoon, reports The Guardian.

"Mitigation work is currently under way by our engineering team. We believe that most impact was mitigated at 0740 US/Pacific [1540 BST], allowing many services to recover. Impact is now believed to be limited more directly to use of the IAM API," the report quoted Google spokesperson as saying.

Gmail was quickly restored for some users, "and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future," Google said.

The outages came after a period of intense growth in web traffic, which has caused problems at a number of companies, including Microsoft and more.