Thousands of YouTube fans, gmail users, and students who depend on Google Classroom found themselves unable to use these online programs early Monday morning. 

According to CNN, Google's services shut down for a brief window of time on Monday (Dec. 14) due to a massive outage that prevented many people from watching YouTube videos, accessing Google Docs, sending email on Gmail, and prevented access to Google Classrooms.

Shortly after 7 a.m. (CST), Google's services came back online.

YouTube took to Twitter to issue a statement on the temporary outage, posting, "We are aware that many of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now -- our team is aware and looking into it. 

We'll update you here as soon as we have more news."

Update -- We’re back up and running! You should be able to access YouTube again and enjoy videos as normal https://t.co/NsGBvvaTko

— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) December 14, 2020

During the outage, the web giant itself issued a statement regarding the issue on its Google Workspace Status Dashboard web page, saying: "The problem with Gmail should be resolved for the vast majority of affected users. We will continue to work towards restoring service for the remaining affected users, but no further updates will be provided on the Google Workspace Status Dashboard.

Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better."

Internet services fail from time to time for a variety of reasons: server errors, incorrectly installed maintenance routines or a host of other potential goofs and glitches. CNN reports that Google's most recent major outage took place in September, when Google Docs went down for several hours.