Google Inc's online news site experienced service disruptions for roughly two hours on Tuesday, in the second major outage to affect the company in a month.

The Internet search giant said in a statement it had resolved the problem, which lasted from 12:25 p.m. Pacific Time on Tuesday until 2:20 p.m. Google did not say what caused the outage or how widespread it was, but noted that many users experienced difficulty accessing the site.

Google news hosted 16.4 million unique visitors in the United States in August, according to comScore. That would place it among the top 10 news websites in the United States, although comScore said it groups Google's news site as a search site, not a news site.

Yahoo Inc is the No. 1 news site in the United States, according to comScore.

Earlier this month, a majority of Google email users were unable to access its service for more than an hour. Google said the outage was due to some of its routers becoming overloaded during a routine upgrade of certain servers.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; editing by Richard Chang and Andre Grenon)