Google's consumer-facing services suffered a brief outage on Thursday after "a pool of servers" crashed.

Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, and Google Search were among those impacted at around 9:30 pm Eastern for 30 minutes. Google Classroom, a service used for remote learning in the pandemic era, was also brought down.

But the company's Cloud Platform, which hosts other companies' services and sites, stayed up, with just some APIs impacted.

Routing servers routed, so Google needs to root out the root cause

"A pool of servers that route traffic to application backends crashed, and users on that particular pool experienced the outage," Google's infrastructure head Urs Hölzle said in a tweet.

"We're very sorry for the outage, we know how critical these services are to everyone's lives. We're working on a postmortem to ensure this won't happen again," he added.

Despite such postmortems, this outage is not wholly unique. This year alone has seen several Google outages, including two large incidents in March, another in April, and yet another in August.

Then there was the time cows risked causing Google outages, but the problem was solved before major disaster.