Gmail back up after outage

Computerworld - Google Inc.'s Gmail service is back up after experiencing disruptions for about two and a half hours earlier today.

The hosted e-mail service went down some time before 11 a.m. Eastern time and was still having problems well after 1 p.m. According to a statement from Google, the problems have been fixed and all users should have full service again.

The entire e-mail service crashed this morning and then came back up an hour or so later. Even then, contact lists were still unavailable for many users.

Google initially reported today that only a "small subset" of users were affected by the outage, but it later confirmed in an e-mail that a majority of its users were without the service. A Google spokesman also noted that the "extent of slowness and service degradation varied from user to user."

Frustrated Gmail users took to Twitter to voice their frustrations and look for information. One user wrote, "Gmail More and More Like Late '90s Era Hotmail... So much for those Gmail reliability." Other messages included "OMG is gmail still down?!!" and "GMail CEO pls take note. I wanna sleep. Make sure when I wake up, GMail back to normal. Else I'll use Hotmail."

The Gmail problem comes on the heels of an hour-and-a-half Google News glitch on Tuesday. Google did not reveal the cause of that crash or how engineers got the news aggregation site working again.

Also,earlier this month, Gmail experienced one day of intermittent disruptions followed by a second day during which users saw multiple delays and outages. Gmail users also endured well-publicized crashes in both February and May.

Juan Carlos Perez of the IDG News Service contributed to this article.

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