An apparent outage left many users unable to access Gmail, Google's free web-based email service, on Wednesday.

Gmail, like many web services, experiences occasional availability problems. But the issue of Wednesday lasted several hours and hit a substantial number of users, judging by our postbag and posts (http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Problem-solving/browse_frm/thread/ab49f4c7d1522802?) on a Gmail forum.

By Thursday, the Gmail service was restored to normal. Nobody from Google with knowledge of the issue was available for comment at the time of going to press.

According to Netcraft, the Gmail domain resolves (http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.gmail.com) to one of 10 IP addresses. There's no uptime data on Gmail from Netcraft. ®

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