Google's Gmail hit with two-hour outage

IDG News Service - Google Inc.'s Gmail hosted e-mail service was unavailable starting around 10:30 AM GMT on Tuesday, but it appeared to come back online for most users around two hours later.

The scope of the outage was not immediately clear, but at least some users in Europe and Asia on Tuesday could not get access to their in-boxes or had to wait a minute or more for them to open.

"We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a number of users," Google said in an advisory on its Gmail support site. "We're working hard to resolve this problem and will post updates as we have them. We apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused."

Google has had trouble with Gmail before, setting off waves of concerns over the reliability of the service.

Last August, there were three significant Gmail outages that affected not only individual consumers of the free Web mail service but also companies and organizations paying for Google Apps Premier, the company's hosted suite of collaboration, messaging and office productivity services. Apps Premier costs $50 per user per year.

To compensate for the downtime, Google extended a credit to Apps Premier customers and also said it would get better at notifying people of problems. Google now offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee for Gmail for users paying for Google Apps Premier.

On Aug. 11, an outage lasted about two hours and affected almost all Apps Premier users. The other two, on Aug. 6 and Aug. 15, hit a small number of Apps Premier users but locked some users out of their accounts for more than 24 hours.