Google hit by worldwide service accessibility issue

Google was hit by a worldwide outage late on Monday Australian time with users reporting 500 errors and access issues across its range of consumer-facing cloud services.

The company confirmed the issues in a brief status notification.

“We're aware of a problem ... affecting a majority of users,” the company said at the time.

Affected users were “unable to access” all services from Gmail, Docs and Drive to consumer services like YouTube and Google Maps.

The company said that the issues started at about 10.55am AEDT.

Some services - including Gmail - were operational again by 11.30pm and most users were back online by 11.52pm.

The scale of the outage was quickly apparent on social channels like Twitter, where Google quickly started to trend, racking up over 1 million mentions in the first 30 minutes.

Some users were able to access YouTube and other services by opening them in an Incognito window in the Chrome browser; iTnews was able to successfully do so.

That appeared to confirm a theory that the primary issue was with Google Accounts, which caused users to be unable to authenticate in order to access any Google-owned services or third-party services that allow users to login with their Google credentials.

Google had not provided an official explanation for the outage at the time of publication.

The company’s Google.com search engine did not appear to be impacted by the problems, nor did its business-focused cloud platform (GCP) services.

Google asked users to "please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority" at the company.

"We are making continuous improvements to make our systems better," it said.