Update 2: Here's Google's response, though it's in the context of this being a Gmail outage, when it was pretty clearly an across-the-board service disruption:

On Monday, 10 December 2012, we experienced an issue with Gmail and some users experienced slow performance or errors. For everyone who was affected, we apologize - we know you count on Google to work for you, and we worked hard to restore normal operation for you. Although our engineering team is still fully engaged on investigation, we are confident we have established the root cause of the event and corrected it. Our current best estimate is that a significant subset of users' Gmail web queries were affected for an aggregate of 18 minutes, from ~08:54 - ~09:00 and then from ~09:04 - ~09:16 Pacific Time.

Update: It seems like things are returning to normal, though Google has yet to issue a statement. We'll post a link here if and when they do. The Gmail service status page does show that a disruption is being investigated.

Hey, can't get Gmail / Drive / Talk / the Play Store to work this morning? It's not you! Google's broken, or something. Right now, Gmail is in and out of service, and the outages are apparently causing the desktop Chrome browser to crash for some reason.

The Play Store, Drive, Talk, and other Google services are also affected. We don't know how wide the outage is, but we're guessing based on the amount of attention it's getting so far that it's somewhere between "fairly wide" and "really wide." We'll keep you updated if we learn anything else. Unless everything fixes itself in the next 10 minutes, in which case, just ignore this.