Alphabet's Google said on Sunday it had resolved the network congestion in the eastern United States that affected services in Google Cloud, G Suite and YouTube. Google said it would conduct an investigation of the outage and make appropriate improvements to the company's systems to prevent or minimize future recurrence. Cloud computing is one of Google's most lucrative services, but faces stiff competition from other technology companies like Amazon and Microsoft.

Earlier on Sunday, Google said it was experiencing high levels of congestion, adding that the incident began at 3:25pm EDT (12:55am IST). Google said it had identified the root cause, but did not elaborate.

Snapchat, which also experienced outages, said it was aware of the issue. DownDetector.com - an outage tracking website - showed that the number of Snapchat-related complaints had peaked at more than 48,000 before falling to about 1,800 as of 9pm EDT (roughly Rs. 6:30am IST) on Sunday.

Snapchat's parent company, Snap, said in its annual report it used Google Cloud, but neither company responded to questions about whether the Snapchat outage was linked to the Google Cloud issues.

During the outage, many users took to Twitter to complain about it under the hashtag #YouTubeDOWN.

"When Snapchat and YouTube are both down and you don't know where to go next #YouTubeDOWN #snapchatdown," a user going by the name Jasmine tweeted.

"Google, YouTube, Snapchat, Shopify, all currently down. Is the Internet melting?" asked one Twitter post.

In March, the world's largest social network, Facebook, blamed a "server configuration change" for a massive outage affecting its applications around the world.

The outage affected users for at least 12 hours in most areas of the world, with the biggest impact in North America and Europe, a tracking website said at the time.

Written with inputs from Agencies