YouTube, Gmail and a host of other Google services suffered outages around the world this afternoon.

The issue lasted for approximately an hour, but Google did not disclose the cause.

The US has also issued an emergency warning after discovering that "nation-state" hackers hijacked software used by almost all Fortune 500 companies and multiple federal agencies to gain entry to secure IT systems.

Andy O'Donoghue joined us to discuss what could be behind such outages.