Google outage hits Gmail and Google Drive users, Australia among most severely affected

Google’s email service has been hit with a worldwide outage and Australia is one of the countries most severely affected.

Services across US, Japan, Malaysia and Australia have been most severely affected, according to outage tracking website Down Detector.

Google’s email service Gmail has been hit with a worldwide outage knocking communications out for users everywhere, including Australia.

The issue first surfaced this afternoon, around 1pm (AEDT, with Google’s GSuite Status dashboard subsequently saying that the system had encountered a problem.

According to outage tracking website Down Detector, complaints about Gmail peaked at around 2pm (AEDT) with over 3500 complaints logged, with some users still facing access issues.

Services across US, Japan, Malaysia and Australia have been most severely affected.

“We’re investigating reports of an issue with Gmail. We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behaviour,” Google said.

The latest update from the company at 5pm (AEDT) Wednesday showed that it’s still working to fix the technical issues.

“The problem with Gmail should be resolved, we apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.”

“Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.”

While services are slowly coming back, access to Gmail remains patchy and with a billion users globally, the outage has the potential to severely disrupt businesses.

The disruption is also impacting Google Drive.

Gmail was hit by a similar issue in January this year, when many users encountered a “404” error as they tried to access the service.

That outage was also global in scale with affected users spanning Europe, North America, South America and Asia.

Google did not formally disclose the reasons behind the outage at the time.

Google has been contacted for comment on today’s outage.