Google hacked/not hacked ?As of approx. 4:30PM CST, Google, Google News, GMail, and other Google services are offline. While the cause of the outage is yet unknown, any downtime (currently running into its second hour) for a major service such as Google cannot be good.

Google has been struck by problems recently in the wake of the release of their Google Web Accelerator. It emerged that users visiting sites where they can log in - including Neowin - are being logged in as other users of the service. In addition, the program caused problems by prefeching pages on web scripts that could potentially cause harm to the users online data.

We'll keep you informed on this changing story as it develops.

Update: Looks as though Google has restored most services including GMail. Unconfirmed reports claim that Google was temporarily hacked.