New Zealand companies may receive compensation from Google following an outage which affected the tech companiy's Gmail email service this morning.

Google first notified its customers via the Apps Status dashboard they were investigating the issue which was reported to only affect Google for Work Gmail users at 3.16am (NZ Time).

New Zealand companies may receive compensation from Google following an outage that affected the tech company's Gmail email service this morning. File Photo.

Companies around the world were left frustrated by the outage, with businesses in Britain and United States reported to be the hardest hit.

While some New Zealand customers were unable to open their email accounts at 9.30am, six hours after the fault was initially reported, reports Fairfax.

According to Google's Apps Service Level Agreement, the company promises its services will be 'operational and available to Customer at least 99.9 per cent of the time in any calendar month”.

'If Google does not meet the Google Apps SLA, and if Customer meets its obligations under this Google Apps SLA, Customer will be eligible to receive the Service Credits,” the agreement reads.

This means the company must pay or credit customers the equivalent of its charges for three days, for outages that last up to about seven hours and 15 minutes, and seven days' fees for faults that take longer to fix.

Google identified the root cause of the issue shortly before 4am, then 40 minutes later the company reported that services had been restored for some users and resolution for all users was expected 'in the near future”.

Were you or are you still affected by this morning's outage of Google's Gmail email services? Post your experiences in the comments section below.