Gmail, YouTube and the majority of Google services went down for users in Europe today. But they are now back online.

Google sent us the following statement about the outage: "Today, at 3.47am PT Google experienced an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue.

"Services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period. The authentication system issue was resolved at 4:32am PT. All services are now restored. We apologise to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future."

The original story continues below: 

As an update to our story, we have now been able to log into Gmail and other Google account services.

Previously, we couldn't sign into or receive Gmail messages, speak to Google Assistant devices, or even access YouTube videos.

As well as ourselves, other users reported no access to their Google accounts or services too.

We have not yet had a full explanation of what has happened or why accounts were unavailable.

You can check if which of the services are now back up and running on Down Detector - a dedicated UK website that shows if different services are unavailble.

There were massive spikes across all Google services earlier, including even Google Maps.

Could it have been an orchestrated attack against one of Big Tech? Twitter and Facebook remained unaffected.

We'll inform you if we hear anything back from Google about the issue.