Updated Google's popular free email service failed this morning at about 11am.

At time of writing, access to webmail version of Gmail was patchy, and POP3 and IMAP access was unavailable.

He apologised to users for the inconvenience.

The normally reliable Gmail service has suffered several failures recently, including a Europe-wide outage in February lasting several hours. Google blamed that incident on the failure of its data centre to take up the slack when one was taken offline for routine maintainence. ®

Update

The service is back up. Google says it's still investigating what happened and will let us know.

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