Chronic Gmailers Go into Withdrawal in Hours without E-mail

A Gmail outage on Tuesday morning sparked confusion among users while Google worked furiously to correct it.

E-mail outages at companies, universities and small-time e-mail services can be all-too-common occurrences. But when you have 110 million users – as Gmail does – people tend to notice. And they did Tuesday morning, when the popular e-mail service suddenly and unexpectedly stopped working for users around the globe.

According to Gmail’s own blog, monitoring software alerted the company of outages at 9:30 a.m. GMT (5:30 a.m. EST). Gmail acknowledged the failure in its blog entry shortly thereafter to alert users to the troubles, but it wasn’t fixed until about two and a half hours later. The company indicated it affected "many users," but didn’t offer any numbers.

Gmail reliability manager Acacio Cruz posted an update later apologizing for the outage. “We know that for many of you this disrupted your working day. We’re really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could. Our priority was to get you back up and running,” Cruz wrote.

According to Cruz, the actual cause of the error is still unknown, and Google engineers are still working to uncover it.