Since this morning the Internet has been abuzz about widespread trouble with Google.

Google Search and Google News performance slowed to a crawl, while an outage seemed to spread from Gmail to Google Maps and Google Reader. Comments about the failure were flying on Twitter, and quickly became one of the most searched terms on the popular micro-blogging site.

A Google spokesman said “We’re aware some users are having trouble accessing some Google services, and we are looking into it, and we’ll update everyone soon. Please let us know how Google services are working for you in your location and on your connection.”

UPDATE: The issues seem to be going away around 9:50 Pacific time.

UPDATE 2: 10:35 AM Pacific: Google says the problems are resolved and will give more details later. “The issue affecting some Google services has been resolved,” the spokeswoman writes. “We’re sorry for the inconvenience, and we’ll share more details soon.”

When the outage began, many users turned to Twitter to vent their frustrations and to look for information. Twitter users also were quick to begin reporting that the trouble was clearing up. “Google is back and I’ve stopped twitching,” said one Tweet.

This kind of outage is going to be tough on Google. When Google goes down, lots of stuff breaks. Not just Google’s own apps like GMail and Google Talk, but also applications like Firefox, which use Google as it’s default search provider.

All of Google, or at least the big pieces, went down and this is bad news for Google’s efforts to build up Apps, and to a lesser extent, Gmail, as critical business tools. It also undermines the entire category of hosted applications. If the mighty Google can stumble, then who can be trusted?”

The problem is not downtime- it’s lack of any way to mitigate the problems, and a complete and total lack of any customer service from Google. There is NOBODY you can call when there’s a problem.

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That February outage came just a week after Google acknowledged that some users had experienced problems getting results from Google News searches over a span of more than 14 hours. Other users reported that entire news sections, such as Science/Technology, were coming up empty of stories. And last December, Google confirmed that there was a technical problem with Google Talk and the Web-based Gmail chat system. One day early in the month, messages created by a “subset” of users were left unsent because of glitches in the messaging system.

The scope of today’s outage isn’t immediately clear but it appears to be international.