[Infowarrior] - Google’s Gmail service crashes across world

[Richard Forno]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/google/4797727/Googles-Gmail-service-crashes-across-world.html

Google’s Gmail service crashes across world
Google’s web-based email service, Gmail, has crashed this morning,  
leaving millions of users from Britain to Australia unable to send and  
receive messages.

By Claudine Beaumont
Last Updated: 2:50PM GMT 24 Feb 2009


Google?s Gmail service has suffered a worldwide crash preventing  
millions of users from accessing their mail

The email service went offline at around 10.25am GMT, and the outage  
appears to have affected users throughout the UK as well as across  
Europe, and even as far afield as Australia and India.

It appears that only web-based Gmail access is affected, and users can  
continue to send and receive messages using other devices, such as  
mobile phones and third-party mail clients.

Google could not confirm what had caused the outage. “A number of  
users are having difficulty accessing Gmail,” said the company in a  
statement. “We are working to resolve the problem. We know how  
important Gmail is to users, so we take issues like this very  
seriously, and we apologise for the inconvenience.

“We are posting status updates about the problem at mail.google.com/ 
support.”

Bloggers and Twitter users were quick to flag up issues with the  
service. Google’s web-based email system is usually fairly robust, and  
suffers little downtime, so many internet users were left baffled by  
the problems and at a loss as to what to do. Many Twitter messages  
offered workarounds to the problem, such as using mobile email  
applications, while other Gmail users said they would simply down  
tools and make a cup of tea and wait for the issue to be resolved.

Several major companies, including Telegraph Media Group and The  
Guardian, have switched to using the Google Apps suite in place of  
conventional desktop email. Google Apps allows users to work  
collaboratively on documents via the web, as well as share calendars,  
and provides instant messaging and chat alongside Gmail email services.