Gmail outage hits ‘small subset of users’

September 24th, 2009 |

Author: admin

Gmail was unavailable Thursday morning for what Google said was a “small subset of users,” the latest outage from a company that prides itself in running advanced computing systems.

On the Google Apps status dashboard, the company said at 7:29 a.m. PDT that it was aware of the problem. However, using IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) to access e-mail through software such as Outlook or Thunderbird still works, the company said.

Even a small subset can be a lot of people, though, as carping on Twitter indicates.

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).”

Google had Gmail outages in February, April, and very widely on September 1.

Gmail was working for me Thursday morning, but slowly and without access to my contacts at 8 a.m. PDT. By 8:13 a.m., it was behaving properly.

Updated 9:15 a.m. PDT – Many users are reporting that their e-mail is back to normal, but there are still problems with Gmail contacts. Google posted the following advisory at 8:29 a.m. PDT.

“The Gmail issue should now be resolved for most of our users. There still might be issues with your contacts. For Gmail users: Use www.google.com/contacts to access your contacts For Google Apps Customers: www.google.com/contacts/a/yourdomain-name.com.”