113 million people use Google's free email system 'GMail'

Google’s free email service ‘GMail’ was down for 2.5 hrs and went off line at approx 09:30 GMT.

Google have apologised for the outage stating that they do not know what caused the problem but are looking it what the root problem was as a priority.

There is independent evidence that the service was down for up to 4hrs for some users.

In a statement posted on its official Google blog it said: “We’re really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could.”.

It said its engineers were still investigating the “root cause” of the problem.

“We know how important GMail is to our users so we take this very seriously,” it added.

“The majority are now able to access their e-mail accounts again and we’re hoping to have service restored for the remainder very soon.”