Google users across the globe may have noted that online access to their Gmail had been unavailable between the hours of 09:30 and 11:30 this morning.
The outage was said to effect "a number of users" who attempted to access their email via Google's web portal, while users opting to retrieve mail via third-party applications are believed to have remained unaffected.
Web-monitoring company comScore lists Gmail as the world's third most popular web-based email service, behind only Hotmail and Microsoft. With an estimated 113 million users, the outage is likely to have hit millions of individual and corporate accounts, sparking Google into stating that it's "really sorry for the inconvenience".
Although the service appears to have been restored, Google has yet to clarify the cause of the problem, and it remains unknown exactly how many of its 113 million users were unable to access the Gmail service.
Speaking on the official Google Blog, Gmail's site reliability manager Acacio Cruz made the following statement:
If you’ve tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we’re having some problems. Shortly after 10 9:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email.
We’re working very hard to solve the problem and we’re really sorry for the inconvenience. Those users in the US and UK who have enabled Gmail offline through Gmail Labs should be able to access their inbox, although they won’t be able to send or receive emails.
We’re posting updates to the Gmail Help Centre at http://mail.google.com/support/ and Google Apps users can visit the Google Apps help centre at www.google.com/support/a.
Thanks for bearing with us while we sort this out. We'll report back as we make progress.
Were you affected by the outage at home or at work? Share your experience in the HEXUS.community forums.
