GMAIL and other Google services have been brought to their knees by an outage affecting thousands of users in the UK.
Problems with the popular platforms began at 8:44am GMT (3:44am EST) on Friday, according to online outage trackers.
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More than 2,300 people have reported problems with the Gmail app and website to DownDetector, which monitors online blackouts.
Of those complaints, 55 per cent were logged due to server connection issues, while 29 per cent noted trouble sending or receiving emails.
A further 15 per cent were related to difficulties with the Gmail website.
Many report seeing a 502 error when trying to access emails, that reads: “The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.”
Thousands have also logged issues with YouTube, Google’s search engine and other Google services.
Google Chat, Google Meet, Google Calendar and Google Groups have also been hit by outages, according to Google’s app status dashboard.
While the outage appears to have most heavily impacted the UK, users in countries such as Spain and Kenya are also reporting problems.
People in the United States appear to be largely unaffected.
It’s not immediately clear what’s responsible for the blackout or what proportion of users are affected.
The Sun has tested the Gmail app and website on multiple devices in London and they appear to be working properly.
Google says it is investigating the issue and is working to resolve it.
Gmail fans took to Twitter to bemoan the unexpected downtime.
One wrote: “Gmail is down….Nice quiet day in work for me then”.
Another said: “Gmail really chose to be down on the wrong day”.
And a third fumed: “FFS gmail!! #gmaildown #gmail”.
Gmail has an estimated 2billion active users around the globe, making it the world’s most popular email service.
As well as regular consumers, tens of thousands of businesses use the platform as their primary means of communication.
OUTAGE MAYHEM
It’s the latest in a string of recent outages to hit the internet’s big players.
Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram crashed twice in the space of a week last month, while Snapchat went down for hours just days later.
The online services of major UK banks and phone networks also experienced outages within days of one another during a rocky October for some of the world’s biggest websites.
One analyst said at the time that users of major social media sites can expect online services to go down with increasing frequency.
“Large infrastructure struggles to simulate changes at scale, which can seemingly wipe them offline for hours at a time with eye watering financial impact,” Jake More, a specialist at cybersecurity firm ESET, said.
“Unlikely to be a cyberattack, although that is never completely off limits, this sort of problem is increasing in volume and scale due to the sheer size of some of these sites, and urgently needs to be addressed with better protection methods.”
“Spreading infrastructural measures across different internal platforms can help mitigate the impact and risk, but unfortunately hindsight is a virtue with these platforms that have become so enormous.”
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In other news, Google Chrome users are being warned to delete the browser amid fears highly sensitive data is being harvested.
Facebook has announced that it’s changing its name to “Meta”.
The company is working to create lifelike avatars of its users that they can control in a virtual world called the “metaverse”.
And, Apple’s system that exposes creepy iPhone apps that track your location or snoop on your browsing history has finally arrived.
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
