Google apologises for Gmail outage

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 12 Aug 2008 at 10:59

Google has apologised for the problem that left millions of Google users without access to their email accounts.

The outage affected users in the US, Canada and India and caused mass outrage across the web with users venting their frustration across forums, blogs and twitter.

"How many people have been crippled by Gmail? There should be a better way of getting email, that doesn't collapse," noted flagelin on twitter.

"This is literally my first day with Google Apps installed as our email provider. What a way to wrap up an internship - finally rolling everything to Google Apps, only to have a service outage," says one poster on the Google forums.

In an acknowledgement at the scale of the problem, Google posted a rare apology on its blog: "We don't usually post about problems like this on our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted.

"We heard loud and clear how much people care about their Gmail accounts. We followed all the emails to our support team and user group, we fielded phone calls from Google Apps customers and friends, and we saw the many Twitter posts. We never take for granted the commitment we've made to running an email service that you can count on.

Google says the problem was caused by "a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly" and says the problem is now completely rectified.