More than 40% of global internet traffic disappeared after Google experienced an outage on 16 August.

Although services are now restored, the outage had prevented users from accessing services for about five minutes.

Google Apps Dashboard’s said all its services had been hit.

"We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behaviour," Google said.

"Between 15:51 and 15:52 PDT, 50% to 70% of requests to Google received errors; service was mostly restored one minute later, and entirely restored after four minutes."

The latest outage comes after Microsoft’s Outlook.com was attacked, which stopped some of its users from receiving emails.