Google Gmail service down

24 February 2009 10:33 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Email users opting to use Google's Gmail email service were thrown into a panic as the service went down on Tuesday.

"Gmail down, PANIC STATIONS, PANIC STATIONS. Or I could go and make a cuppa, I suppose", summed up the cries on Twitter as users looked at communicating with people in other ways.

"We aren't sure what the problem is. Our engineers are working on it", a spokesman for Google told Pocket-lint.

The service went down at around 10:20am GMT and, as yet, has failed to come back online. However users have reported that they are still able to access email via their desktop inboxes and phones, suggesting the problem is related to just the website.

"It's a worry", one company who uses the service for its corporate email told Pocket-lint. "If I can't trust it, I will have to move to another offering".

Recently high-profile companies, such as UK newspaper The Guardian, moved to the free service in an attempt to save money.

This is the second hiccup by Google in as many months, in January human error forced Google to believe every site on the Internet was malware.

We are awaiting conformation as to whether this is a localised UK issue or a global one.

UPDATE: Google has posted the following on the gmail support site:

"We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a number of users. This problem occurred at approximately 1.30AM Pacific Time. 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".

UPDATE 12:33pm GMT: Gmail appears to be back online in the UK

Full tags

Software, Online, Google, Email, Gmail