Google's cloud bursts yet again

Scattered outages for Gmail users

By Kelly Fiveash • Get more from this author

Posted in Applications, 10th March 2009 11:41 GMT

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Google has admitted that some Gmail users cannot currently access their email just weeks after the company suffered a major outage following a technical cockup at one of its European data centres.

It confirmed that a “small subset of users” have been affected by the latest downtime, but didn’t provide a definitive number and could not confirm when the service would be back up and running.

It’s also unclear if only individuals who use Gmail for free are affected, or if business customers who pay for the service are also being hit by Google’s latest embarrassing outage.

"The team is working as quickly as they can to resolve the problem,” said Google in a statement. “We know how important e-mail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously.”

In the meantime affected users can, once again, stare at this status page and keep hitting the refresh button until Google brings Gmail back to life for its 113m user base.

Just last month Google was forced to apologise after Gmail suffered a major collapse when some of the firm's data centres in Europe failed to cope with a routine maintenance event.

The company’s web-based email service was flat as a pancake for about three hours on Shrove Tuesday (24 February) and affected individuals and business customers worldwide. ®

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