GMAIL and other Google services were brought to their knees by an outage affecting thousands of users in the UK this morning.
Problems with the popular platforms began at 8:44am GMT (3:44am EST) on Friday and lasted for several hours.
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More than 2,600 people reported problems with the Gmail app and website to DownDetector, which monitors online outages.
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 reported seeing a 502 error when trying to access emails, that read: “The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.”
Thousands also logged that they were struggling to access YouTube and Google’s search engine.
Google Chat, Google Meet, Google Calendar and Google Groups were also hit by outages, according to Google’s app status dashboard.
While the downtime appears to have most heavily impacted the UK, users in countries such as Spain and Kenya also reported problems.
People in the United States appear to have been largely unaffected.
In a statement roughly three hours after the problems began, Google announced that services had been restored.
It appears the issue stemmed from a fault with Google Cloud, a suite of public cloud computing services offered by Google.
As well as offering the technology to customers, the company runs many of its own services – including Gmail, Calendar and more – off of this infrastructure.
“We are aware of a service disruption to some Google Cloud services, including Google Workspace, causing access issues,” Google said.
“We have addressed the initial issue and restored access for most users. We are still monitoring the situation.”
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
