Google services including YouTube, Gmail and Google Docs went down for users around the world, leaving people unable to access the busy platforms shortly after 11:30 am. The technology giant’s service status website confirmed the firm’s entire suite of apps had suffered an outage, but did not confirm what had caused the issue or a timeframe for when services would return online.
Concerned Twitter users questioned the safety of their Gmail emails and whether their privacy had been compromised.
One angry user said: “Just went to check my emails and I couldn’t, got worried until I saw this.
“Thought it was only me.”
A second concerned Gmail user, added: “Today #googledown gave us a big wake-up call of our huge dependence on #Google We thought Google was fail-safe.”
Others took to social media to share their frustration with the outage, with the technology giant quickly trending on Twitter.
One person on Twitter said: “So scary! Cant do e-learning without Google Classroom!”
Another questioned: “My email is not working actually it says that it cannot find my account!
“What’s happening, dear?? My google docs account better be safe I have a degree to get! Pls 2020 don’t do your magic again.”
READ MORE: Gmail lost emails: are you missing messages in the Google outage?
The company said it would “continue to work towards restoring service for the remaining affected users”.
It made clear that no further updates would be provided via its service status website.
Services started to resume as of 12:45pm.