Google apologized for the massive outage of services including Gmail, Google+, Calendar and Documents Friday morning, which lasted for roughly 50 minutes in most parts of the world.

Google suffered a massive outage on Friday that downed most of its services including Gmail, Google+, Calendar and Documents. The web giant addressed the issue in a blog post later Friday, explaining the cause of the outage to be a software bug that caused users' data requests to be ignored.. Google apologized for the massive outage that lasted for roughly 50 minutes in different parts of the world including, the U.S., Europe, Canada, and India.

According to Google, the widespread outage started affecting the services at 11:02 a.m. PST, after the malfunctioning software bug started generating an incorrect configuration at 10:55 a.m. "The incorrect configuration was sent to live services over the next 15 minutes, caused users' requests for their data to be ignored, and those services, in turn, generated errors," Ben Treynor, Google's VP of Engineering, said in the company's blog, Friday.

The engineers started working on the issue and generated a new configuration to fix the error at 11:14 a.m. Since, it takes 15 minutes to send configurations to the systems, the affected services were restored and almost all the users' had access to the web services by 11:30 a.m. Some users still complained about the existence of the issue and it lasted for an additional 30 minutes.

"Whether the effect was brief or lasted the better part of an hour, please accept our apologies-we strive to make all of Google's services available and fast for you, all the time, and we missed the mark today," Google said.

In order to avoid the recurrence of such errors, Google is putting targeted monitoring in place to quickly detect and fix any cause of service failures in the future.

Google is not the only web company that suffered from massive loss of service, in fact Yahoo was widely criticized for its week-long outage in December last year.