Google suffers Gmail and Drive outage worldwide after a week of Australian controversy

After warning Australian users about ‘risks’ to its services, Google appears to be suffering an unrelated online outage affecting millions of users.

IT’S not just you: Gmail and at least nine other Google apps went down this week.

After days of warning Australians that Google services were “at risk” over law reform, the company appeared to suffer an unrelated worldwide outage for many of its biggest services on Thursday, affecting millions of users.

The disruption lasted for more than seven hours before it was fully rectified after 9pm last night, impacting peak work times for countries across the globe.

Gmail users began reporting problems with the email service shortly before 2pm, suffering intermittent issues when sending and receiving mail, logging in and attaching files, according to DownDetector.

About 20 minutes later, more problems were reported with Google’s cloud storage service Drive, which stopped accepting file uploads.

Other Google services to stop working during the outage included Groups, Chat, Meet, Docs, Slides, Keep, Sites and Google Voice.

Technical issues recorded included issues creating files in Drive, posting messages in Google Chat, and recording in Meet.

The problems even impacted YouTube users, with the company’s video team noting that they were “experiencing some delays in video uploads processing”.

The technology giant did not issue an official statement on the cause of the problem yesterday, only noting on its service dashboard that the issues were resolved at 9.10pm.

“We apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support,” a note on Google’s outage page said.

“System reliability is a top priority at Google. We are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.”

The tech giant has yet to reveal the cause of the damaging outage, which some called its largest in 16 years.

Hacking has not been tipped but some reports point to issues with software updates and the return of US schools.

Google’s technical problems came just days after the trillion-dollar tech giant started issuing “warnings” to Australians about the availability of its services in Australia after the country’s competition watchdog ruled it should pay for the news it uses on its platform.

In an “open letter” to users advertised on its main search page and in pop-up messages on YouTube, the company said proposed laws to see it share revenue generated from news content used on its platform would put its “free services at risk”.

Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims said Google’s letter contained “misinformation,” however, and only it could set a price for its services.