Google Investigates Gmail Outages Affecting 385,000

A Gmail outage appears to be affecting users across the world, with error messages appearing for many of those trying to access their accounts.

Members of the TechWeekEurope team began having issues at around 3.45pm today, with a blackout occurring until 4.30pm, when the service was still not working smoothly.

Gmail users flocked to Twitter to complain, with many noting that some of their accounts were down, whilst others were up. Web developer Phil Sturgeon said: “Gmail is exceedingly broken right now. Got 2/6 addresses down and clients are phoning the office wondering whats up.”

Twitter user Ximing Yu said: “My main gmail account is now unavailable, but my the other account looks fine… how Google managed to do that?”

Google to the rescue?

Problems appear to be global, with North Carolina State University putting out a notice on its website. “Currently some NCSU Gmail users are receiving 500 errors when trying to login (Temporary Error 500). These login errors are normally cleared up quickly,” it said.

At 2.20pm, Google said there was a problem, but it affected only 0.11 percent of its Gmail user base. Given there are around 350 million active Gmail accounts in the world, that still amounts to around 385,000 users.

Google later claimed the issue was fixed, even though users were still complaining on Twitter that they could not access their mail. Up until 4.45pm, TechWeekEurope staff were continually greeted with the message “Oops… the system encountered a problem (#852)” when trying to load messages, and email was not loading up. When clicking the ‘retry now’ button, the message indicated it would not retry for a matter of minutes.

“The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. If you are still experiencing an issue, please contact us via the Google Help Center,” Google said on its Apps status dashboard.

Google told TechWeekEurope it could not go into detail on what caused the outage, but sent this response: “We’re aware that some users are experiencing an error when accessing their Gmail.  We are working on a resolution and apologise for the inconvenience.  Thanks for your patience.”

There was a significant Gmail outage in April, when the email service experienced problems for just over an hour, denying two percent of users access to their mail.

UPDATE: This story previously said 800,000 Gmail accounts were affected by the outage. That was based on figures claiming Google had 720 million Gmail  users. Google got in touch with TechWeekEurope to say there were 350 million users, so the figure in the article was amended to 385,000.

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