Gmail, Google Drive down: Many Google services hit by widespread outage

Google's status page says that the services are recovering, though some are still reporting problems

HMRC have coaxed £130m in back payments out of Google over a period of 10 years (Getty)

Many of Google's most popular services have stopped working, leaving Gmail, Google Drive and other services inaccesible.

Almost every major Google consumer product was hit by the outage, including Gmail, Google Docs and Google Drive.

Google's own status page now says that all of its services are back online.

The page's update said that "The problem with Google Docs should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better."

Google's online productivity suite is used by many of the world's largest companies. It is covered by the Google Apps "Service Level Agreement", which means that Google will give free service to companies that pay for it if they are unavailable for more than 99.9 per cent of any given month.