Breaking: Google under cyber attacks, apps down

Gmail, Google Drive, Google Sheets and YouTube as well as the main search engine Google are down in some part of Africa.

According to outage tracker DownDetecter, tens of thousands of users have complained of the irresponsiveness of the apps since around 11:40am.

Europe, Australia, the east coast of the USA, South America and Asia were also affected.

Early on, there were reports of cyberattacks in the White House and other government institutions in the US.

The Google attacks however affected many more people across the world

By 11:54am, there was more than 50,000 complaints for YouTube alone. with half (49 per cent) regarding issues with the website and 43 per cent pertaining to problems watching videos.

Gmail had 23,000 complaints before midday and Google’s main site had a reported 19,000 complaints.

Eighty-one and 91 per cent of the issues with these sites, respectively, was to do with logging in, according to DownDetector.

Other affected sites includes Google Meet, Hangouts and the Play Store as well as the Pokemon Go game, which is made by Niantic, another Google-owned company.