Hundreds of thousands of people were unable to see emails and talk to work colleagues after Google stopped working.

YouTube and several of Google's services including their hangout, maps and calendars went down for around half an hour at lunch time.

No reason for the problem has yet been announced but it caused issues for people across the globe.

The issues were first reported at 11.30am and also caused disruption for teachers using Google Classroom.

At around midday today Google services started to experience some issues.

Just before 1pm said they were "aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users" and that it appeared to be a worldwide issue.

Most Google services seemed to have been restored just before 1pm but some issues may persist into the afternoon.

“Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better,” the company added.

Adam Leon Smith, chair of the Special Interest Group in Software Testing at BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, highlighted the issues had by users of Google’s smart home products during the outage and said the incident showed how dependent on technology the world was today.

“People are sat in the dark unable to turn on their lights controlled by Google Home. My last two meetings have been unable to use the planned slides as they are stored in Google Slides,” he said.

“Our dependency on technology has grown so much, but the amount spent on reliability, testing and quality hasn’t grown in parallel. Many companies will be reviewing their SLAs (service-level agreements) with Google today and realising their business is dependent on a stack completely outside of their control.”

Other search engines including Mojeek remained available.

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