Gmail users were hit with an unwelcome outage on Friday afternoon, leaving up to 42 million people disconnected from their inboxes, contact lists, and email logs for nearly an hour.

According to an article from Tech Crunch, the outage effected many different services provided by the normally consistent and reliable Google. YouTube – which recently switched over to a new comment system that allows users to link their YouTube accounts to their other Google profiles – was impacted, with comments failing to load on most videos. Google +, the search engine giant’s social media network, was also down.

Most users trying to log into their Gmail accounts on Friday afternoon were greeted with a (500) service error message, which normally denotes a brief technical difficulty. Indeed, the outage didn’t last very long: users began noticing the problem at around 2:00 p.m. EST and impacted services were back up about 50 minutes later. However, the brevity of the Google outage didn’t stop upset users from flocking to Twitter to air their grievances. Such has become the trend with any similar internet outages – unless, of course, the outage involves Twitter itself.

The Twitter outcry wasn’t surprising, since a Google outage of any length and scope will, at this point, still impact a huge number of people. Since this particular outage hit email accounts toward the end of the work week, it was especially notable, and a report from the Washington Post indicates that roughly 42 million people were hit by the outage. Ironically, the down time occurred while Google’s Site Reliability Engineering team – essentially the branch that keeps Google and all of its services running like a well-oiled machine – was doing an AMA (ask me anything) promotion on Reddit.

Before the end of the day on Friday, Ben Taynor, the Vice President of Engineering for the Google team, addressed the outage in a blog post, explaining the technical reasoning behind the problem and how it had been solved. According to Taynor, the outage was caused by a software bug, which “generated an incorrect configuration” within Google’s internal system. Because the configuration generation process essentially “tells other systems how to behave,” the incorrect configuration briefly derailed several of Google’s live services, causing “users’ requests for their data to be ignored.”

Luckily, however, the bug wasn’t malicious or difficult to fix. In fact, Taynor said that the system essentially fixed itself, with the configuration system generating a replacement configuration that brought Google’s services back to their normal state.