Update: 7:55 am ET: Google's status dashboard reports that all services are back online. Some services may still be intermittent, but not for long.

Update: 7:45 am ET: Gmail, YouTube, Nest, and other services are slowly coming back online, but some users are still reporting problems.

Original story as follows:

It's not uncommon for something on the Internet to break. Most of the time, it's not much, or it's caused by too much traffic. Then something big happens and people flip out.

At the time of this writing, Google search is working fine, so you can look up whatever you want to look up. However, everything else that Google is doing seems to be offline. Google Drive (and its related apps), Maps, News, Play, YouTube, Google Assistant, and even Google Keep cannot connect to the servers.

Google Search was working fine, but everything else Google does seemed to be completely offline for about 40 minutes. Google Drive (and its related apps), Maps, News, Play, YouTube, Google Assistant, and even Google Keep could not connect to the servers to connect.

Test emails sent from one Gmail account to another Gmail account were not delivered, and attempts to log into Gmail resulted in a Temporary Error 500 message. Some services have since been restored, but I still get a warning that I cannot access my contacts.

Of course, this problem illustrates the potential for over-reliance on Google products in the age of remote work. Google offers a wide variety of products, many of which involve communication over the Internet. However, if there is a problem with Google's servers (which this is), all of Google's applications will be unusable.

The bigger problem, of course, is that some important features are also down, Nest's security being one of them, and the associated smart home gadgets become completely inoperable. Security cameras and thermostats are completely offline, but thankfully more serious things like Nest Protect work even without an Internet connection.

Other less obvious services, such as Pokémon Go, were also affected because of their reliance on Google Maps to generate in-game content. However, users are no longer able to log in completely; rather, maps are no longer displayed.

While this outage will no doubt be resolved soon, it seems pretty bad that most of Google is no longer fully functional. We will keep you posted as soon as we know what has happened. In the meantime, you can check the status on Down Detector and Google's own status dashboard.