The popular e-mail service offered by Google, Gmail, was down for several hours earlier today. The problem has since been fixed and Gmail has stated on it’s official blog that it is looking into and investigating the root of the problem. “…We’ll share more information soon. Thanks for bearing with us.”
Most users who access Gmail via a web browser were receiving a “Unable to reach Gmail” error when they tried to login. According to the official Gmail blog users using IMAP or POP were still able to access their email normally. “If you have IMAP or POP set up already, you should be able to access your mail that way in the meantime.”
Outages, such as the Gmail one, are not uncommon among industry and market leaders. Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL have all had their fair share of problems in the past. Gmail is currently third on the list of most popular email services
Google has been reported saying the down time does not appear to be the result of a virus attack or other form of malware but the cause is still unclear.
The Internet and blogosphere have been abuzz with speculation about the outage. The Gmail outage has claimed the top ten spots in Google Trends for most of the afternoon and has also claimed the top spot on Twitter trends.
Now imagine where we’d be if both Twitter and Google both went down at the same time.
