According to multiple reports, the Start pages of Google Apps have encountered some unavailability issues from Thursday afternoon to Friday morning.

Apparently, the users had reported broken links, impossibility of opening Gmail accounts, misconfigured buttons and error messages.

As Rishi Chandra, Google Apps product manager, explained for PC World, the reason behind those problems was a bug which affected especially the organizations who had customized the Start page of their Google Apps.

At the beginning the administrators thought that the problem were caused by a Start Page update, but Chandra expalined that this wasn’t the reason.

He also mentioned that Google solved the problem and all Start Pages affected by the outage should revert to their normal layout and functions.

Google Apps comes in three editions, Standard and Education, which are free, and Premier, which costs every user $50 per year.

Google Apps has been available as a free service since August 2006 and it includes the large storage-capacity service Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and the Start Page feature for creating a customizable home page on a specific domain. In September last year, Google has added Google Presentations into Google Apps.

Google Apps Premier Edition, the business version of Google Apps, was unveiled in February last year and it offers over the free version APIs for business integration, 99.9 percent uptime, 24x7 support for critical issues and advertising is optional.