Gmail is currently facing a significant worldwide outage, particularly impacting users in the United Kingdom.

Reports indicate that users globally are experiencing outages with both Gmail and Google Drive as of Friday morning.

The outage began at 19:15 UTC on August 8 and lasted until 00:11 UTC on August 9, with users encountering error messages like 'Oops, something went wrong.'

Google has acknowledged the disruption, which lasted over four hours, affecting both Gmail and Google Drive functionalities.

The root cause of the outage was identified as a latent misconfiguration in their lock-service infrastructure, which impacted a critical storage layer during high load.

In addition to email sending failures, users also reported server connection issues and difficulties accessing the Gmail website.

Google confirmed that users may fail to send emails or save drafts with attachments, although sending emails without attachments remains functional.

Currently, there are no workarounds available, and Google has not provided an estimated time for full service restoration.

The engineering team at Google is actively investigating the issues and working on implementing fixes.

Google has reassured users that the outage was not caused by a cyberattack.

Gmail, part of Google's G-Suite products, serves over two billion users worldwide, highlighting the outage's extensive impact.

Despite the challenges, Google reported a decrease in error rates and is committed to resolving the issues promptly.