Google's popular e-mail application Gmail went down Tuesday afternoon for about an hour and a half, in an outage affecting both free and paying users.
The outage began sometime around 1 p.m. Pacific time, and ended at approximately 2:25.
In a message posted at 12:53 p.m., the company wrote "We're aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 1:53:00 PM UTC-7 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change."
The outage came just as Google finished a rare advertising campaign that attempted to persuade companies to ditch Microsoft applications such as Outlook and Word for Google's online Apps for Your Domain, which includes Gmail as its centerpiece.
Gmail suffered a wide and long outage on May 14 this year, which led many to worry about the reliability of so-called cloud computing services, where critical portions of companies' businesses are handled by remote computing services, such as Google, Zoho and Salesforce.com.
The service remained available via remote clients, such as Outlook or the iPhone's mail client, using POP3 or IMAP.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but did acknowledge and apologize for the outage on its Gmail blog.
See Also:
