Gmail outage sets users all a Twitter

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 12 August 2008 08:51

Business IT - Networking

Many of the people complaining about outages affecting Apple's MobileMe email facility have asserted that it would be OK if it was a free service like Google's Gmail. But Gmail users 'think different' - a Gmail outage lasting a couple of hours caused a considerable stir.

The outage occurred during the afternoon of August 11, US time. Since that was outside working hours in Europe, Africa and the Asia Pacific region, relatively few users outside North and South America were affected.

Affected users - apparently a large proportion of those trying to use their Gmail accounts - received a "502" error message, which generally indicates a failure in communication between two servers involved in handling the request.

There are around 92 million Gmail users worldwide, according to figures published earlier this year by ComScore Media Metrix, putting it well behind MSN/Hotmail (256 million) and Yahoo (255 million). The number of Gmail accounts had grown by nearly 50 percent during the previous year after the service allowed people to open accounts without an invcitation from an existing user.

Google officials advised various US-based news sites that the issue was caused by a temporary outage in the contacts system used by Gmail.

The outage caused a considerable stir on Twitter, and search terms such as "gmail down", "gmail outage", "gmail error", "gmail 502", "gmail status" are still prominent on Google Labs' Hot Trends list of frequent searches.