<<Print>>

It's the go-to email service for many people around the world, but it appears that Gmail has crashed this morning. 

According to DownDetector, the issues started at around 08:44 BST. 

While the reason for the outage remains unclear, of those who reported issues, 49 per cent said they were struggling with a server connection, 30 per cent will having problems sending emails, and 21 per cent were struggling with the website. 

Despite an influx in tweets about the outage, Gmail claims that there are no known issues.

Several frustrated users have taken to Twitter to discuss this morning's outage.

Many appear to be getting a 502 error when trying to access their emails, that reads: 'The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.'

While the issue appears to be affecting UK users predominantly, others have reported problems getting into Gmail from other countries including Spain and Kenya. 

Despite the influx in tweets about the outage, Gmail claims that there are no known issues. 

Replying to one of the many tweets asking what was going on, the Gmail account simply said: The Google Workspace Status dashboard doesn't show any outages. 

'Could you tell us more about what seems to be happening with your Gmail address? We'd be happy to help.' 

Gmail isn't the only service to have crashed in recent weeks. 

Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook and Instagram crashed for the second time in a month last week, while a string of banks, phone networks and fellow tech giants have also experienced major outages recently.

Even Britain's biggest supermarket Tesco was brought to its knees by a hack of its website and app last month, leaving thousands of customers unable to order groceries for 48 hours and costing the retailer an estimated £40m in lost revenue. 

Gav Winter, CEO of website performance and cybersecurity firm RapidSpike.com, has said that large scale outages have risen over the past 12 months, adding that human error was a often a big culprit. 

He said mistakes occurred because many staff are under pressure from their company and choose to take ill-fated shortcuts.