Google has been hit by outages in a host of countries around the world, with users reporting issues with Gmail, Google Drive, Hangouts and Google Maps for several hours.

Various websites that track Gmail problems and outages, showed a spike in users reporting problems with the email service from about 1pm AEDT (2am GMT).

In a statement on their service website, Google said: “We’re investigating reports of an issue with Gmail. We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behaviour.”

Google reported that the issues had been resolved at 5.30pm AEDT (6.30am GMT).

Gmail has more than one billion users. Those affected by the outages were unable to send emails, receiving an error message that said “Message could not be sent. Check your network and try again”. Others experienced problems opening attachments.

During the outages Google said that “customers will have issues accessing or attaching files in various products”, including “attaching or accessing attachments” to emails, “as well as accessing and saving draft emails and sending emails.” Google also confirmed there were issues with uploading and downloading files from Google Drive and uploading photos or attachments to Hangouts.

Google Maps also appeared to be experiencing issues, with users who tried to activate Street View mode seeing a black screen, instead of images of the location. This issue was not confirmed by Google on its G Suite dashboard.

Google did not confirm the cause of the problem.

The issues affected users around the globe, with people in the US, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America reporting problems.In Australia the hashtag #gmaildown was trending.

Some people in Australia reported that the outages were a good excuse for not working through the afternoon.

Others suggested the problems could force people to revive their embarrassing once-used hotmail addresses.