Google and its e-mail users had a rude awakening Tuesday morning, with Gmail suffering a major outage between about 1 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. EST. The BBC reported the service returned for many users after about four hours, which would make it one of the longest e-mail outages for the search giant.
113 Million Gmailers
Although it occurred in the middle of the night, an outage of that length is significant because Gmail’s users are estimated at about 113 million. This makes it the third most popular e-mail service in the world, behind Hotmail’s 280 million users and Yahoo’s 274 million.
Google Apps, a suite of business applications that includes Gmail, is used by more than a million businesses worldwide. One of those businesses is Google itself, which was unable to reply via e-mail to journalists during the outage.
The service agreement for businesses specifies that Gmail and Google’s other services will be 99.9 percent operational each month. If the uptime is lower than 99.9 percent, paying customers may be eligible for a refund.
On The Official Google Blog, Gmail Site Reliability Manager Acacio Cruz posted a notice at 4:28 a.m. acknowledging the company had “some problems.” Later he wrote, “our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their e-mail.”
He apologized for the inconvenience, and noted that, at the time of the posting, users in the U.S. and U.K. who “have enabled Gmail offline through Gmail Labs should be able to access their inbox, although they won’t be able to send or receive emails.”
Problem ‘Now Resolved’
A posting on the Google Apps support site also noted the problem and offered an apology. “The problem,” the notice said, “is now resolved and users have had access restored.” The company takes “issues like this very…