Gmail experienced an outage during the weekend that, according to Google, affected a relatively small number of users. Some problems reportedly continued through Monday, including loss of all e-mails in inboxes and sent-mail folders.
Complaints began showing up on the Google Help Forum Sunday afternoon. One user reported that his account was at first “unreachable,” and, when he finally was able to log in, all e-mail had disappeared, as well as chat history, settings and labels Many others posted similar problems. One noted that his account has been reset “so it’s like a brand-new Gmail account.”
‘Service Disruption’
As of early Monday afternoon, the Google Apps Status Dashboard reported there was still a “service disruption.” The software giant hasn’t indicated the cause of any problems, although it said it was working to fix the problems. Some accounts have reportedly been restored.
A Google Gmail engineer named Mike CH posted on the support forum early Monday morning that “we have temporarily locked the affected users out of their accounts whilst we perform repairs.” He added that “accounts that are affected are fully disabled,” and the company was trying to disable only Gmail so other Google services would be available in the meantime, and so that e-mail would stop bouncing and get “queued up for later delivery instead.”
After the first reports began appearing, Google said the outage affected only 0.29 percent of worldwide users, while the latest update indicates 0.08 percent. That’s a tiny percentage of the total user population, but a substantial actual number of users — about 150,000.
Hotmail, BlackBerry Outages
Google promotes the uptime of its apps as a key selling point, and it’s generally close to 99.99 percent. As a precaution, the company has given directions under its Help menu on how to back up Gmail to other e-mail accounts.
Reliability, especially of critical…