GOOGLE has been hit by a major outage, leaving thousands of users unable to access their emails or use map services.
Disruption is understood to have began at around 8am today, with users across the UK, and in particular Eastern Europe, flagging they had issues using a number of Google’s services.
These include Google Maps, Gmail, and Google Drive.
According to website Downdetector, disruption peaked at around 8.45am, when 327 individual reports of outages with Google were made.
Users in Turkey have reported being unable to access YouTube while Gmail users in Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece were struggling to read their emails.
Elsewhere, Google Maps was failing to load map data, search for locations, or even calculate routes.
Some users also reported issues with Google Drive not allowing access to their documents.
Google has yet to comment on the outage.
People have reported receiving the message “5xx server error”, which indicates a problem on Google’s end, not with the user’s internet connection.
Turkish Deputy Minister of Transport and Infrastructure Omer Fatih Sayan has said that Google is “experiencing an outage affecting Android and related services in Turkey and the European region.”
The outage is affecting Gmail and Google Maps 
