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Computerworld - Many of the tens of millions of people who use Google Inc.'s Gmail service have been without e-mail a for an as-yet undetermined period yesterday and today.

Google acknowledged on its Apps Status page that its popular Gmail service has been down. It's not clear how long the service has been out. In a 4:02 p.m. EDT post on the site, Google noted that the e-mail service had been restored for "some users." Engineers expect everyone's service to be back up in 1.2 hours, the post said.

According to the status page, the problem began yesterday when service disruptions were reported. It's not yet clear what is causing the problem.

Google did not respond to requests for information about the outage, though it's Web site said it would report on the outage after 5 p.m. today.

The Twitter social network erupted with frustrated tweets from users unable to access their Gmail accounts.

Tweets ranged from: "Gmail, where did you go? I cannot live with this 502 error", to "It's bad when a company like Google can't keep Gmail up and running" and "Dear gmail. Was it something I said? I only use my yahoo acct for shopping. It means nothing to me. Please come back. XXOO."

Google has suffered several big glitches in the past several months.

This past May, Google suffered a major failure when Google Search and Google News performance slowed to a crawl, and an outage seemed to spread from Gmail to Google Maps and Google Reader.

And last February, Google's Gmail was hit with a highly publicized two-and-a-half-hour outage.

That glitch came just a week after Google acknowledged that some users had experienced problems getting results from Google News searches over a span of more than 14 hours.

The scope of today's outage isn't immediately clear but it appears to be international.

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