Google Calendar now up and running after three hours of downtime

Users were met with a 404 error message when they tried to access the service

Google Calendar is now up and working again, after being inaccessible for about three hours for thousands of users around the world.

The problem started at 10am Eastern Time, leaving thousands of users unable to access Google Calendar on their desktop and mobile devices.

When users tried to access the service through a browser, they were met with 404 error message instead of getting details of their meetings and scheduled events.

At 10:22am Eastern Time, Google confirmed that it was experiencing a service disruption, but didn't elaborate on the cause of the problem.

'We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Calendar. We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are unable to access Google Calendar,' the company stated via its G Suite Status Dashboard.

Google services such as Google Maps and Gmail were not affected by the issue, although many users said that they were facing difficulties in accessing Hangouts Meet. The Google Calendar app for iOS also appeared to be working normally during the outage.

Some users took to social media to express their frustration over the issue, and soon the hashtag #googlecalendardown started trending on Twitter.

More than 4,000 people reported the issue to the website DownDetector.

London, Manchester, Dublin and Newcastle were among the UK cities hit by the problem. Outside of UK, users in Brazil, the United States and Japan also reported problems.

At 1:15pm Eastern Time, Google announced that the issue was resolved for all users.

'The problem with Google Calendar should be resolved. We apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.'

It is the third instance of Google services suffering an outage in this month. Earlier this month, on the 2nd June, an issue with the company's Cloud service took services like Gmail, YouTube and Snapchat offline. At that time, 'high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA' were said to be responsible for the issue.

On Monday evening, an issue with Gmail left a large number of users unable to access the service.