Google’s Gmail service failed again on Tuesday. Users trying to access their e-mail accounts were greeted with a server error, and Google acknowledged the problem on its Gmail forum.
The service is the third most-visited e-mail service in the U.S., and it suffered short outages twice in May. In February Google apologized for a significant outage, and there were other failures last year, including a 15-hour interruption that Google attributed to “a temporary outage in our contacts system.”
Users from Italy, Germany, France, Ireland, Taiwan and the United States reported problems on the Gmail forum. Google’s other Web services appeared to be working normally.
The outages create problems for Google as it tries to convince corporations to use its cloud-based services. Google Apps customers pay $50 a year and may be entitled to an extension of their contracts because of the outage.
Google said on its Gmail blog, “Because this is impacting so many of you, we wanted to let you know we’re currently looking into the issue and hope to have more info to share here shortly. If you have IMAP or POP set up already, you should be able to access your mail that way in the meantime. We’re terribly sorry for the inconvenience and will get Gmail back up and running as soon as possible.”
Some Gmail users reported short and limited disruptions on Monday as well.
Frustrated users posted a flood of comments on Twitter, some of them humorous. Several posters quipped that cities were “in flames” and people were “eating pets” to survive.