Hmm, I don’ t hope this is going to be a trend, but this morning around 10:20am (GMT) Google Gmail went down globally! Since then it has failed to come up again. I noticed it because my Gmail checker on my Mac ceased to work and said it timed out. Off course I tried to find out if it was just my connection or if something else was going on. I soon ran into a page in the UK that confirmed what I figured out already: Gmail is down globally! And it’s the second big outage in two months. On Feb. 2nd there was a human error that both crippled Google search and Gmail.
I wonder what the reason is this time. It really puts a big dent in Google’s reputation, especially since they use some form of advanced cloud computing to make their email work globally. Google’s other services like docs, reader etc. seem to be working fine.
well, I am sure millions of bloggers will write about this hickup, just as I am doing right now. This is not good for Google’s PR and – I am sure – their stockprice! I’ll update this story as soon as there is some more news.
Update (12:30 GMT+1):
Gmail Help now shows a message about the outage.
Update 2 (12:31 GMT+1): Just now I could connect again using IMAP and Thunderbird. Maybe it’s solved again? Webmail is still down. I wonder if there is going to be an official statement about the cause of the problem(s).
Update 3 (13:55 GMT+1): For me Google is working again. Both webmail and IMAP/POP3. Also, Google has put a statement online on their official blog:
- Google blog statement