Gmail goes down

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 24 Feb 2009 at 11:06

Updated at 1:45pm: Gmail suffered from a widespread outage this morning, with visitors to the webmail service presented with blank screens.

In a statement - issued over the telephone - Google admitted it's had a problem. "A number of users are having difficulty accessing Gmail," the company said. "We are working to resolve the problem."

"We know how important Gmail is to our customers, so we take issues like this very seriously."

Shortly after 1pm, the service appeared to resume, with the Gmail Help Centre reporting things are back to normal.

Google wouldn't comment on the scale or the nature of the problem. However, Gmail was by far and away the biggest topic being discussed on Twitter this morning, according to the TwitScoop feature of TweetDeck, suggesting it wasn't a local issue.

The back-end appeared to be functioning normally, with various people on Twitter reporting that they could still get IMAP access to their inbox.

The outage was a baptism of fire for Gmail's new offline access feature, which was launched last month. The service provides offline access to the inbox by storing a local copy of emails on the PC, using the Google Gears browser add-in.