Google has acknowledged and offered apology on Friday following the outage its popular and free email other services witnessed by the users due to software snags. The internet giant however said that the problem has been fixed. The outage affected around 42 million users for close to an hour on January 24.

There were complaints from Europe, Canada, the United States and other regions elsewhere for disruption in services.  An online Google Apps tracking dashboard indicated this.

“Whether the effect was brief or lasted the better part of an hour, please accept our apologies-we strive to make all of Google's services available and fast for you, all the time, and we missed the mark today” Treynor said.

Acknowledge the disruption Google engineering vice president Ben Treynor said in a blog post, “"Earlier today, most Google users who use logged-in services like Gmail, Google+, Calendar and Documents found they were unable to access those services for approximately 25 minutes,"

He however said that, the issue has been resolved, and we're now focused on correcting the bug that caused the outage, as well as putting more checks and monitors in place to ensure that this kind of problem doesn't happen again."

He said that for about 10 per cent of users, the problem persisted for as much as 30 minutes longer." Google did not disclose the full extent of the Gmail glitch but the brief outage was believed to have affected millions of people, including those using the service at work.

The outage however gave an opportunity to its rival Yahoo to mock to Google with the tweet "Gmail is temporarily unavailable". It was accompanied by image of Google's "Temporary Error (500)" page. This however was removed late.