San Francisco — Well it has been a shocking experience once again on Friday morning: No access to Gmail account, Google’s popular beta email service has suffered yet another cross-continental outage, leaving users across the world with inability to access the service, and has been unavailable for at least about 20 minutes. Users were greeted with a “Temporary Error (500)” and the message, “We are sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes.” Ugh. Thanks, Google.
Attempts to access Gmail returned the message: “Oooops…. the system encountered a problem,” giving error 500, code 26 as the reason.
The normally dependable Gmail service has suffered several breakdowns recently, including a Europe-wide outage in February lasting several hours. Google attributed that incident on the failure of its data center to take up the slack when one was taken offline for routine maintenance.
Today’s outage is the latest for Google’s web-based email service in recent months and appeared to have started at around 11am GMT, and quickly became one of the hottest trending topics on Twitscoop, the website that tracks discussion subjects mentioned in Twitter messages.
An agitated twitter user was seen shrieking: “Gmail is down! Gmail is down! Gmail is down! Gmail is down! Gmail is down! We are all going to die!!!!!”
Similarly, many users poured their anger out when they attempted to access Gmail, they were greeted with a message which typically stated: “We are sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes.”
Rob Lovell, CEO of ThinkGrid, a UK provider of hosted business IT, was apparently outraged by the outage, sending the INQ an unsolicited statement in which he declares that Google’s “services are too risky for business use.”
“The latest Gmail outage today again highlights the business risk of using this service,” foamed Lovell, adding that although the cloud model could “bring significant benefits to companies,” this does not mean “the management principles applied to traditional IT should discarded.”
“Google’s one business day [service level agreement (SLA) policy] leaves too much room for error. In the current climate this can spell disaster,” raged Lovell, adding that organizations “should be looking to cloud providers who can provide far tighter SLAs and support.”
Google said it was aware of the problem and working hard to resolve it, but could not make an official statement on the cause of the incident, or how long it would take to get Gmail up and running again.
The problem is noted on Google’s Apps Dashboard site, which provides live information on the status of Google products and services. Under the section labeled “Today’s status”, there is a red cross beside Google Mail, and a note to signify a service outage.
After investigating and resolving the issue Google has issued a statement: “A number of our users had difficulty accessing Gmail this morning. The problem was immediately investigated, and service was restored within 20 minutes. We know how important Gmail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We encourage anyone having technical difficulty to visit the Gmail Discussion Group or the Apps Status Dashboard.”
The breakdown appeared to have affected Gmail users around the world, although within the last few minutes, some were reporting that normal service had been resumed.
This is the latest in a series of Google outage. In February, Gmail remained unavailable for around two and a half hours, while there were several other periods of downtime late last year. And in January, Google blamed “human error” for a snag in its web system that resulted in the Google search engine flagging up every website as a potential source of viruses and malicious software.