A Google outage that affected Gmail and Google Drive users globally starting approximately 2:53am GMT has been resolved, Google said this morning, apologising for the issue but providing scant details on what caused the serious performance errors, which lasted approximately four and a half hours.

The outage came a day after Google’s Cloud status page also showed issues with its  Google App Engine Blobstore API and App Engine Version Deployment, with the company’s engineering team having to migrate underlying storage infrastructure to resolve the issue, which lasted over three hours.

App Engine is a web framework and cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centres. The outage left companies scrambling to inform their customers any app outages were not their fault and that Google was addressing the issue

Gmail has more than one billion users. It is unclear how many were affected but #Gmaildown was trending on Twitter in Australia overnight.

Those affected by the Google outage were unable to send emails and received an error message saying: “Message could not be sent. Check your network and try again”.

Users were seeing “error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior” Google said. Maps was also affected, some users reported.

During the outages Google said that “customers will have issues accessing or attaching files in various products”, including “attaching or accessing attachments” to emails, “as well as accessing and saving draft emails and sending emails” along with access issues to personal cloud storage offering Google Drive.

To be updated.

google outage

See also: Microsoft Office 365 Outage: Day Two as Enterprise User Grumbles Grow