Gmail suffers a short outage

Twitter search results for 'Gmail.' Looks like we have an outage.

(Credit: Twitter)

Well, this was something nice to wake up to on a Friday morning: No access to my Gmail account. I was greeted with a "Temporary Error (500)" and the message, "We're sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes." Ugh. Thanks, Google.

I went over to Twitter Search to see what other people were saying, and sure enough, a search for "gmail" produced plenty of complaints about outages, with hundreds more rolling in by the minute. Many of them, given the timing (it was about 6 a.m. Eastern time) appeared to be in Europe or Asia.

Some complained that other Google apps were down, too, but I could access the three that I use most often (Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Reader) just fine.

Gmail suffered an outage in February that was big enough for the company to apologize for it; that one, as well as a smaller one in March, took place when it was the middle of the night in the company's Bay Area headquarters. Perhaps this is Google's way of telling people on the East Coast to stop waking up so early.

I'm a free Gmail user, and I'm guessing that so are most of the twitterers airing their grievances. But for paying Gmail customers, Google promises 99.9 percent uptime, or it'll reimburse them to some degree.

Update (3:23 a.m. PT): About a half hour after I originally noticed that my account was down, it's back up (at least for now), but loading very slowly.

Update (4:48 a.m. PT): Google has issued a statement: "A number of our users had difficulty accessing Gmail this morning. The problem was immediately investigated, and service was restored within 20 minutes. We know how important Gmail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We encourage anyone having technical difficulty to visit the Gmail Discussion Group or the Apps Status Dashboard."

[jregan439]

My iGoogle gmail widget said this morning:
<quote>

The Gmail gadget does not support the "Always use https" setting that you chose in full Gmail. If you would like to use https, please open full Gmail. Learn more
</quote>

Of course I've only been successfully using iGoogle with the same settings for a month or so - and gee, when I refreshed the widget...... :)

[mjconver]

And it's back

[divalicias]

My Gmail account is also down -- same message. Egads.

[knowles2]

it been working fine for me all morning.

[mjconver]

I was down for about 10 minutes. No big deal, it let me finish reading the morning paper.

[paul613]

Like jregan439, I found that my gmail gadget had stopped supporting https. But the gmail gadget found here ("Gmail: Now with Full-Screen viewing"), does:
http://www.gingagadgets.com/hub.php?caller=gmail

[loose_screw]

Holy crap, is this really newsworthy? I can't count the number of times I've been unable to log into my yahoo or hotmail accounts, not to mention their IM servers, and for longer periods of time, yet there was no news articles about those incidents.

[subie09lega]

I agree, I can't count the number of times per day that the in-gmail chat feature tells me that it cannot connect to gmail. Often when I click to send an email, it hangs for a minute or two before it finally sends the email. I know that they are constantly working on "labs" stuff (thus the perpetual beta status) but you'd think that they could keep it up and running just for the basic features.

[gefitz]

Meh. (shrug)

[nasserd]

Somebody call Congress. This is worthy of a congressional subcommittee investigative panel on server reboots.

CNET... you're the new InfoWorld... which was the new eWeek.... crappy mainstream journalism.

[DaveinDC]

How come CNET reports on gmail problems? What about Yahoo eMail? and Yahoogroup? Both Yahoo email and Yahoogroups have had some serious email outages in last few months and NONE of them were reported here. Is there a conflict of interest here? CNET, I expect you to answer here or post a seperate article.

[Calomancer]

Get an android phone- then you can get Gmail even then web Gmail fails you. =p