Google battles Analytics outage

Google's Analytics platform was unavailable to most of the service's users for four hours this morning, just a day after the company struggled with Gmail service issues.

Users began reporting problems accessing Google's Analytics platform -  the most widely used web analytics service - earlier this morning. 

Google advised that it became aware of the issue just after 9:30am AEST and said the problem was affecting the majority of its Analytics customers. 

According to web technology tracking firm SimilarTech, around 32 million sites use Google Analytics.

"The affected users are unable to access the Google Analytics reporting interface. No data has been permanently lost and we are working hard to solve this issue," Google advised customers at around lunchtime AEST.

"We apologise for the inconvenience caused by this issue and ensure you we are taking steps to improve the reliability of our service."

At around 1:30pm AEST Google said the issue had been resolved, but did not provide the cause of the outage.

"Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better."

Analytics error message

The Analytics outage follows service glitches affecting Google's Gmail email service over the weekend.

Gmail was inaccessible for most users over parts of the weekend as the result of an expired intermediate SSL certificate for the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) on the Google server tasked to send messages.

This meant users received certificate errors when trying to send emails via smtp.gmail.com through email clients including Microsoft Outlook and OS X Mail.

Service was restored after Google's internal certificate issuer Authority G2 reissued a valid certificate.