MUMBAI: Google services which include the most popular email service Gmail and video sharing platform YouTube faced a major global outage for close to an hour today, impacting millions of users. 

Thousands of users including from India took to Twitter to vent their frustration for not being able to log into Google services that included Google Drive, Maps and messaging service Hangouts for about an hour starting about 5 PM, IST. Several users also complained that they were logged out of ongoing Google Meet sessions and were not able to log in again. 

Although Indian users were able to use Google's search engine, were able to access their emails, Gmail had put up a warning on the top of the page which said, 'Gmail is temporarily unable to access your Contacts. You may experience issues while this persists,' although it was removed by about 6.30 PM IST. 

Latter in the day Google put out an update, "Today, at 3.47AM PT (Pacific Time Zone) Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue. This was resolved at 4:32AM PT, and all services are now restored."

The outage was attributed to 'an internal storage quota issue,' however IT experts say that it could have been a rare issue since Google's servers are not based at one location but hosted over multiple serves at their locations spread globally, besides each server are automatically linked to mirror servers that have the same data stored on them are can switch between each other when required.

Nevertheless, users are justified in getting worried as Google has billions of users, only Gmail and YouTube together have over 3.5 billion registered users and have their data stored on them. Besides individual users, there are millions of paid business accounts who store and share their important documents on Google services.