Gmail Downtime Hits 5 Million Users

Google’s Gmail email service experienced a few problems for just over an hour on Tuesday 17 April, denying 2 percent of users access their mail during that time window.

Two percent of Google’s email users translates to about 5.25 million people.

Causes Unknown

No cause for the outage had been revealed by Google admins by 2:45 pm Pacific time 17 April. The only company statement at that time was: “We’ve implemented a fix and users should now be able to access their mail.  We apologise for the inconvenience.”

Google reported that the outage started at 9:42 am Pacific time. A message from the email administrator at 10:24 am said that “Google Mail service has already been restored for some users.”

A message sent 22 minutes later read: “The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.”

Hundreds of people reported the outage on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and in Gizmodo’s comments, among others.

Good Record

Gmail, which now provides users with 7GB of storage, generally has a good uptime record.

Prior to 17 April, Gmail has been down only once in the last three years and seven times since it went general issue on 7 February 2007.

On 27 and 28 February 2011, Gmail users after signing in found their Gmail inbox contact files empty. About 1.5 million users were affected by that one. There were four outages in 2009, all fairly brief, and one in 2008.

Google reported that Gmail was available 99.984 percent of the time in 2010, and 99.99 percent in 2011.

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