Gmail, Google Drive suffer global outage

Gmail and Google Drive are suffering a widespread disruption, with some users complaining that they are unable to access their files or send emails with attachments, reports The Sydney Morning Herald. 

The issue was first reported on social media at around 1pm AEDT, and complaints came in from North America, South America, Asia, Australia and Europe. As of 4pm the issues were still ongoing for some users although, as it was the middle of the night in America, reports on sites including Down Detector were coming mainly from Asia and Australia.

The issue apparently affects users of workplace G-Suite accounts as well as regular Google accounts, though it's unclear how total the outage is or what has caused it. Many emails still appear to be sending and delivering as usual, and some users can still access Drive.

At 3.44pm Google posted an update to its Gmail and Google Drive G-Suite status dashboards, acknowledging the issue and saying it was investigating the cause. "Users will have issues accessing or attaching files in various products", its said.

This followed Google's initial acknowledgment of the issue at 1.53pm, in which it said users were reporting "error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior".

On Twitter, American entrepreneur and former Googler Chris Sacca appeared to take the outage well, despite saying that his whole social and professional life is run through Mail.

Globally, Gmail has more than 1 billion active users.

A similar outage occurred briefly in January, although it passed without much disruption in Australia as it struck in the evening.

Google has been contacted for comment.