Google services are down worldwide. It was not immediately clear the cause of the shutdown from the global tech giant, on whose operation individuals and businesses across the world rely to function.

The outages appeared to have started shortly after 12:00 p.m. West African Time. Gmail, YouTube, Docs and other crucial services from Google have all been down.

In a statement, Google said it was aware of the development and was working to fix it.

“We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail,” the statement said. “We will provide an update by 14/12/2020 07:12 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.”

Tech experts described the development as rare for the company.

There have been complaints on social media about the downtime with Google, with several online commenters across social media platforms saying they suffered initial panic after assuming that it was a cyber attack.