GOOGLE'S WEB-BASED e-mail service Gmail crashed yesterday, leaving millions of users around the world unable to send or receive messages. Users attempting to log into their accounts in the morning were greeted with server error messages.
Users of Google Apps, the service that enables people to write and share word-processing and spreadsheet documents online, were also affected.
The technical problems started about 9.30am and is believed to have affected web users only, with access to Gmail still available via desktop inboxes and phones.
Google apologised for the outage, which lasted for 2½ hours and affected users in Europe, the US and Asia, but stressed that it was an unusual occurrence.
“Many of our users had difficulty accessing Gmail today. The problem is now resolved and users have had access restored. We know how important Gmail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologise for the inconvenience,” the company said.
Given the rise in corporate users now using Gmail, the cost of the outage may run into millions.
Moreover, such a widespread outage is problematic for the firm as it it attempts to persuade more companies to use its “cloud-computing” services, in which applications are hosted on the internet rather than on corporate computers.
Customers paying Google for using Gmail are guaranteed the e-mail service will be available 99.9 per cent of the time or they get a refund.
Gmail launched on April 1st 2004 in beta release and became fully available to the public in February 2007.
An estimated 127 million people have Gmail accounts, making it the third most popular e-mail provider after Yahoo and Hotmail, according to the internet research company comScore.
Google said late yesterday its engineers were still trying to establish the root cause of the problem.
