After days of warning Australians that Google services were “at risk” over law reform, the company appeared to suffer an unrelated worldwide outage for many of its biggest services today.

And the disruption lasted more than five hours for some users, and is ongoing for others.

Gmail users began reporting problems with the email service shortly before 2pm, suffering intermittent issues when sending and receiving mail, logging in and attaching files, according to DownDetector.

About 20 minutes later, more problems were reported with Google’s cloud storage service Drive, which stopped accepting file uploads.

Other Google services to suffer problems during the outage included Groups, Chat, Meet, Docs, Slides, Keep, Sites and Google Voice.

The technology giant did not issue an official statement on the problem, though listed its 10 services as suffering a “disruption” on its service dashboard.

Problems recorded included issues creating files in Drive, posting messages in Google Chat, and recording in Meet.

At 7.40pm, Google technicians reported the problems had been “restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future,” according to the service page.

“Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.”

There is no word on what caused the widespread technical problems with so many of its apps.

YouTube users also reported issues uploading videos to the service today, though streaming was unaffected.

Google’s technical problems came just days after the trillion-dollar tech giant started issuing “warnings” to Australians about the availability of its services in Australia after the country’s competition watchdog ruled it should pay for the news it uses on its platform.

In an “open letter” to users advertised on its main search page and in pop-up messages on YouTube, the company said proposed laws to see it share revenue generated from news content used on its platform would put its “free services at risk”.

Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims said Google’s letter contained “misinformation,” however, and only it could set a price for its services.