YouTube, Google and Gmail all CRASH as thousands of users complain of issues  

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The Google-owned family of apps appears to be back online after crashing for tens of thousands of users worldwide.  

This includes Gmail, Google Drive, Google Sheets, Maps and YouTube as well as the main search engine. 

It also affected Google Home and Nest, which allows people to control their heating, doorbells and lights, leaving many customers in a state of disarray. 

Some had a defunct doorbell while others were unable to get through to their Google Assistant to turn on, or off, their lights. 

Outage tracker site DownDetecter clocked tens of thousands of users reporting issues with the sites around 11:40am. 

Problems were reported mainly in Europe but also in Australia, the east coast of the USA and parts of Africa, South America and Asia. 

Google said it was ‘aware of the problem’ and that it had left the ‘majority’ of users unable to access its services. 

There has been no official update from Google regarding what caused the global outage and if services have been fully restored.  

Google’s websites are some of the most popular in the world, with its video-streaming site YouTube frequented by more than two billion people every month. 

Gmail meanwhile is the world’s most popular email platform with other 1.5 billion users. 

Unlike other tech firms like Facebook, outages are rare at Google, and there is no explanation for the outage. 

By 11:54am GMT there was more than 50,000 complaints for YouTube alone, with half (49 per cent) regarding the website and 43 per cent pertaining to problems watching videos. 

Gmail had 23,000 complaints before midday and Google’s main site had a reported 19,000 complaints.   

Eighty-one and 91 per cent of the issues with these sites, respectively, was to do with logging in, according to DownDetector. 

MailOnline has approached Google for comment. 

YouTube’s ‘TeamYouTube’ Twitter account said: ‘We are aware that many of you are having issues accessing YouTube right now – our team is aware and looking into it. We’ll update you here as soon as we have more news.’ 

The number of reports spiked at midday before  rapidly dropping to around their normal level at 1pm GMT. 

Other affected sites included Google Meet, Hangouts and the Play Store as well as the Pokemon Go game, which is made by Niantic, another Google-owned company.  

Google’s online dashboard that tracks the status of all its services reveals the problem is ubiquitous across all Google services.

Users took to Twitter to discuss the ailing Google and its widespread issues, with some lamenting the impact it had on remote works.

Others took the rare Google outage as an opportunity to poke fun at the tech giant. 

Tom Phillips, editor of Full Fact, quipped: ‘google is in tier 4’. 

Rory Cellan-Jones, technology correspondent for the BBC called the outage ‘ a bit of a nightmare’ for people using Google Cloud services. 

Some turned to popular GIFs and meme to express their surprise and dismay.