San Francisco — Barely two days after Google News crashed, Google Inc., owner of the world’s most popular Internet search engine, said its web-based email service on Thursday suffered another technical snag for the second time in a month as users reported difficulty accessing their contacts. Frustrated users flocked to Twitter to rant and look for information about downed service.
Earlier this month, a majority of its email users were unable to access the service for more than an hour after a widespread outage caused by an overload of servers during a routine upgrade that handle Web requests. At the time, the company said it planned to increase its router capacity. This week, Google’s news service also suffered a disruption. Gmail is the fourth most popular e-mail service in the U.S., according to ComScore Inc.
Google’s Gmail suffered outages in February, April, and very widely on September 1.
Google’s Apps Status Dashboard at 7:29 am PDT noted, “We are aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail, but we have provided a workaround below.” However, using IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) to access e-mail through software such as Outlook or Thunderbird still works, the company said.
By 8:29 am PDT, Google notified that the problem had been resolved for most users. However, the company acknowledged possible problems accessing contacts through Gmail. It advised users to try visiting google.com/contacts as an alternative.
Another update at 9:35 am PDT suggested that while the problem has been resolved for many users, ongoing problems remain for a small set of users.
A 9:58 am PDT post indicates, “The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.”
Gmail outages hit Google itself sometimes, providing extra incentive to improve reliability. One company spokesman, Adam Kovacevich, said on Twitter, “Gmail down (for Googlers too).”
Frustrated Gmail users quickly flocked to Twitter to voice their frustrations with a flurry of tweets. A Twitter user identifying himself as Lucas Alexander repeated the frequently heard concern about the cloud computing that surfaces every time a Google service goes down: “This Gmail thing today, not making [software-as-a-service] look great.”
Another user wrote, “Gmail More and More Like Late ’90s Era Hotmail … So much for those Gmail reliability.” Others wrote, “OMG is gmail still down?!!” and “GMail CEO pls take note. I wanna sleep. Make sure when I wake up, GMail back to normal. Else I’ll use Hotmail.”
These periodic disruptions comes as Google attempts to compete with Microsoft Corp and International Business Machines Corp by extending its services to business users — who are likely to be less tolerant of long outages.
“A trouble with Google Contacts caused many Gmail users to go through slowness and degraded service for about an hour today,” Google said in a statement.
Gmail already competes with Microsoft’s Hotmail and Yahoo Inc.’s Web-based e-mail. Google offers its email service for free but also sells a version to businesses with extra features and technical support for $50 per user per year.
Fear of these repeated breakdowns, in addition to security concerns, damage the credibility of the cloud. Enterprises that has been evaluating the pros and cons of moving their office productivity or communication to the cloud are becoming wary of adopting “cloud computing” technologies offered by Google as well as Salesforce.com and Amazon.com, which help deliver data and services over the Internet.
Google, situated in Mountain View, California, dropped $1.69 to $496.77 at 4 p.m. New York time on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The shares have gained 61 percent this year.