Gmail’s Ongoing Email Slowdown Nearing Resolution

Good news! Today you can blame your non-responsiveness to all those important emails you’ve been ignoring on Google itself. The company’s online email service Gmail has been experiencing issues leading to delayed emails and attachments failing to download, the company confirmed. Earlier this morning, Google said an estimated 0.24 percent of its Gmail user base was affected by these problems, but in an update released later this afternoon, the delays were said to being affecting “less than 50 percent of Gmail users.”

Given the wording of that announcement, it sounded like, at first, things were getting worse instead of better. Gmail has some 425 million users, according to a public announcement detailing the size of its user base, which was revealed last summer at its Google I/O developer conference.

Google has been providing regular updates regarding the situation throughout the day, the first appearing at 10:25 a.m. ET and noting that it was then starting to investigate reports of an issue with Gmail. This was followed by an update over an hour later that informed customers that delays were involved and some attachments were failing to load.

Updates released at 12:43 p.m., 1:45 p.m., 2:05 p.m., and 2:45 p.m. ET so far only said that the team is continuing to investigate the problem and will update when there’s more information available.

At 3:00 p.m. ET, the company added that the service has been restored for some users, and it expects full resolution within an hour, but this time frame may change. Google did not say which percentage of the “less than 50 percent” of users has had service restored.

We reached out to Google via email for comment on what may have caused this issue, and other details, but you know…