Gmail Hitting Some Turbulence

I tried to log on to Gmail this morning and this is all I’ve been getting for the last hour or so. Anyone else seeing this?

Judging from the response on Twitter and a general search, it appears there are indeed some problems with Gmail throwing server errors (503 and 500) left and right, but it doesn’t seem to be as widespread as the February outage was (yet). But at least I’m not the only one noticing and the Google Apps Status dashboard also acknowledges the Google Mail service has been spotty for a while now.

Either way, if you rely on Gmail for work as much as I do, this is very annoying. I realize it’s a free service and all, but it’s troubling nonetheless. Gmail is one service that’s growing quickly but it’s very un-Google to run into scalability issues so I suspect it’s something else.

Hopefully they’ll acknowledge the problem on the support pages soon – which isn’t the case yet – and the undoubtedly ‘small subset of users’ gets access again soon enough.

Update: it’s up for me after about two hours of downtime, but several users are still complaining about being blocked out.

Update 2: and it’s down again, both on desktop and from the iPhone.

Update 3: after nearly 8 hours of downtime for my account, Google acknowledges the problems.

“Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.”

So the ‘near future’ time frame is a guess and it might actually become the distant future?