Gmail Acting Up? It's Not Just You

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

If your Gmail account is down or consistently throwing random errors your way, like my account is right now, note that it isn’t just you. According to the Apps Status Dashboard, a “significant subset of users” started running into trouble at around 9:45 AM Pacific Time.

Update: supposed to be all fine now, no further explanation given.

At 11:34 PM, Google posted an update, saying that Google Mail service had been restored for some users, and that it expected a resolution for all users “within the next 4 hours” (estimate).

This is the first status update that was posted:

We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are able to access Google Mail, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behavior. We will provide an update by February 25, 2010 8:44:00 PM UTC+1 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

Affected users are experiencing difficulties or delays receiving mail fetched via POP from external mail providers to Gmail. These messages are not lost and should still be stored at the users’ external POP service.

And the second:

Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users within the next 4 hours. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.

It’s rare that Google speaks of a significant number of users when problems arise – usually they say a ‘small subset’ – but a Twitter search actually shows a surprisingly low number of tweets about any issues people are having with their Gmail accounts.

We should note this isn’t the first time Google has had issues with Gmail, and just yesterday Google App Engine went down for an extended period of time.

Are you noticing anything out of the ordinary with the popular cloud service?

Product: Gmail
Website: gmail.com
Company Google

Gmail, also known as Google Mail, is a free email service provided by Google which has innovative features such as “conversation view” email threads, search-oriented interface, and plenty of free storage (almost 7.7GB). Gmail opened in private beta mode in April 2004 by invitation only. At first, invites were hard to come by and were spotted up for sale on auction sites like eBay. The email service is now open to everyone and is part of Google Apps. ...

→ Learn more

blog comments powered by Disqus