Google’s Gmail suffered outage leaving many users with no access to their email, online calendar or contact information.
NewYork Times reported that Google’s Gmail service froze Tuesday at 9:30 a.m. London time, leaving millions of users in Europe without access to e-mail for four prime working hours.
Not only today , gmail had an outage back in August 11, 2008 , and many had trouble accessing Gmail for a couple of hours.
Here is what Acacio Cruz, Gmail site reliability manager posted on Google’s official blog
Current Gmail outage
2/24/2009 04:28:00 AM
If you’ve tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we’re having some problems. Shortly after 10 9:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email.We’re working very hard to solve the problem and we’re really sorry for the inconvenience. Those users in the US and UK who have enabled Gmail offline through Gmail Labs should be able to access their inbox, although they won’t be able to send or receive emails.
We’re posting updates to the Gmail Help Centre at http://mail.google.com/support/ and Google Apps users can visit the Google Apps help centre at www.google.com/support/a.
Thanks for bearing with us while we sort this out. We’ll report back as we make progress.
Posted by Acacio Cruz, Gmail Site Reliability Manager
Later, he wrote that Google gmail outage is now over and it’s outage itself lasted approximately two and a half hours.
Update on Gmail
2/24/2009 07:29:00 AM
The Gmail outage that affected many consumers and Google Apps users worldwide is now over. Users should find that they’re able to access their email now without any further problems.Before you can access your Gmail, you may be asked to fill in what’s called a ‘CAPTCHA’ which asks you to type in a word or some letters before you can proceed. This is perfectly normal when you repeatedly request access to your email account, so please do go through the extra step – it’s just to verify you are who you say you are.
The outage itself lasted approximately two and a half hours from 9.30am GMT. We know that for many of you this disrupted your working day. We’re really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could. Our priority was to get you back up and running. Our engineers are still investigating the root cause of the problem.
Obviously we’re never happy when outages occur, but we would like to stress that this is an unusual occurrence. We know how important Gmail is to you, and how much people rely on the service.
Thanks again for bearing with us.
Posted by Acacio Cruz, Gmail Site Reliability Manager
But, No additional details were provided as to what caused the outage.