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Google admitted that an outage last night to its Gmail service affected around 10 per cent of its userbase - in other words, around 30 million people were unable to access their email online.

The downtime, according to the Chocolate Factory, lasted up to two hours for some punters. However, reports trickling into The Register suggested that a number of users were still unable to access the mail service this morning.

It was only the web interface of Gmail that was affected, so users could still access their messages on desktop and mobile clients using IMAP and POP3.

Google coughed to the blunder on the company's Apps Status Dashboard.

It initially confirmed it was "investigating the matter" before adding that around 2 per cent of users were affected by the outage. It later restored the system "for some users".

By 6.45pm (Pacific Time) Google said the problem had been fixed, and totted up exactly how many of its users were hit by the failure:

We've determined that this issue affected less than 10 per cent of the Google Mail users who attempted to access their accounts during the affected timeframe.

While we have resolved this issue with Google Mail, it's possible that some users may experience message delays because affected accounts weren't available to receive messages. The messages will be successfully delivered after account access is restored.

El Reg asked Google - which has more than 300 million Gmail users - to explain what had gone wrong, but at time of writing it hadn't got back to us with comment. ®

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