Google was on the fritz today, the company confirmed this morning, with the search site slow and people having trouble accessing various Google Web applications according to numerous reports.

Affected services reportedly include YouTube, Gmail, Analytics, Maps, Docs, Blogger and AdSense.

But by 10:30 the company issued a response saying the problem was fixed. The official statement:

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

This follows Gmail outages in February, March and last week.

Yikes. I wonder if this will lead to changes in Google's open development approach that makes it easy for engineers to contribute to the core system, whether or not that's been a factor in the recent crashes.

UPDATE: As promised, Google provided a fuller explanation at its official company blog. The key bit:

An error in one of our systems caused us to direct some of our web traffic through Asia, which created a traffic jam. As a result, about 14% of our users experienced slow services or even interruptions. We've been working hard to make our services ultrafast and "always on," so it's especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens. We're very sorry that it happened, and you can be sure that we'll be working even harder to make sure that a similar problem won't happen again. All planes are back on schedule now.