Gmail Down for Nearly 2 Hours
Gmail, the email service provided by Google, was down for nearly two hours on Tuesday, affecting millions of users around the globe. This meant that individuals who use the service for personal matters, as well as organizations and their employees that depend on the service for business needs, were unable to send or receive mail through Google during the outage.
According to the Google Apps Status Dashboard information posted, Google acknowledged the crash of Gmail just before 9pm GMT on Tuesday, and they didn’t declare the problem was solved until 10:40pm GMT. This dashboard offers availability and performance information about the company’s online services like Talk, Sites, Docs, Calendar, and Gmail.
A Google spokesman said that users were still able to send and receive email through IMAP and POP accounts during the outage period. The company is investigating what caused the service to go down, and they hope to share what they find soon, according to David Besbris, the engineering director.
This latest outage came just after a smaller scale crash occurred at mid-evening (GMT) on Monday, and it is understood that the previous outage wasn’t totally fixed until early afternoon on Tuesday. The Gmail service is one of the most popular in the world, as it is designed to be used by individuals and organizations alike, as well as educational institutions.
Gmail has had many other widespread and well publicized outages, along with some smaller ones. However, Google has maintained that the service is naturally more stable than competing messaging software that users can install on their computers, such as Microsoft Exchange.