Google fixes Gmail outage that affected millions

IDG News Service - An outage that prevented millions of users from accessing Gmail on Tuesday has been resolved, according to Google.

Google first acknowledged the problem at about 12:40 p.m. ET in the Google Apps Status Dashboard, and declared the issue solved at around 1:45 p.m.

The bug affected "less than 2 percent" of Gmail's user base, the company said, without being more specific.

Gmail was down for some users for about an hour on Tuesday.

Gmail has more than 350 million active users, so an outage that lasts more than an hour and affects more than 1 percent of its users inevitably leads to discussion forums and social media sites lighting up with reports and complaints.

Assuming this outage affected 1.5 percent of the user base, that would translate to about 5.25 million impacted users.

Gmail is used by individuals for personal matters and by companies for employee communications as part of the Google Apps cloud-hosted collaboration and communication suite.

Juan Carlos Perez covers enterprise communication/collaboration suites, operating systems, browsers and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Juan on Twitter at @JuanCPerezIDG.