Google appears to have recovered from a widespread outage affecting many of its online services Thursday. Most Google properties were inaccessible to users across the U.S. and worldwide from about 10:45 a.m. until about 12:20 p.m. EDT. People from coast-to-coast and as far as China, Australia, and France were all impacted.

Google released the following statement to PC World about the outages:

"We're aware some users are having trouble accessing some Google services. We're looking into it, and we'll update everyone soon."

About an hour later, a spokesperson sent us the following update:

"The issue affecting some Google services has been resolved. We're sorry for the inconvenience, and we'll share more details soon."

Google Outage 2009: '#googlefail'

The outage, quickly dubbed #googlefail by Twitter users, shut down everything from Gmail to the Google.com home page. Google News, Google Reader, and YouTube were unavailable, as were Google Analytics, Maps, and Docs. Some services were loading very slowly and only functioning minimally, while others were altogether down.

Google has just released the following statement to PC World about the outages:

"We're aware some users are having trouble accessing some Google services. We're looking into it, and we'll update everyone soon."

The Google Apps Status Dashboard, meanwhile -- which was itself inaccessible during the outage -- states the following:

"We're aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail. We will provide an update by May 14, 2009 1:00:00 PM UTC-4 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change. *This may also be affecting other services"

Some theories have pointed to AT&T as a cause of the Google outage, suggesting a routing issue of some sort is to blame. Numerous users connected through other networks, however -- including Verizon, Cox, and Charter -- tell me they experienced the problems as well.

We'll pass along any additional information as we receive it.

Connect with JR Raphael on Twitter (@jr_raphael) or via his Web site, jrstart.com.