Google suffered a service outage Friday Jan 24,2014

Google users attempting to sign on saw a "temporary error" message and a brief note: "We're sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologise for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes."

Google, which first acknowledged the outage at 11:12 a.m. Pacific Time (1912 GMT), said a little over an hour later that the problem with Gmail had been resolved.

As of late Friday Jan 24,2014, the company did not offer an explanation for the outage, which affected users in at least India, Britain and the United States and prompted a stream of complaints on Twitter from users in many more countries

"We're investigating reports of an issue with Gmail. We will provide more information shortly," the company said on its "App Status" dashboard online, which tracks the state of various Google services

Google Docs, the cloud-based productivity application that competes against Microsoft Corp's Office suite, also suffered a service disruption, according to the Google dashboard

Other Google properties, the social network Google Plus, and YouTube, appeared to load slowly as well.