Gmail suffers another glitch in service

10 March 2009 9:43 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Google's Gmail has experienced a break in service once again, just weeks after the email service crashed leaving its users stranded without email.

Following the service's 2 hour outage in late February, more issues are being reported this morning, Tuesday 10 March.

Although Gmail loads up, emails are inaccessible with the service non-responsive and showing a "still working" message.

"We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are having difficulty accessing their accounts. The team is working as quickly as they can to resolve the problem. We know how important e-mail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously", a Google spokesperson told Pocket-lint.

Although Google seems to have been quick to fix the problem, it has raised fears that the service is unreliable.

"They might have fixed it quickly, but if the service is going to be breaking all the time I'll have to consider moving to another option", one Gmail user told Pocket-lint.

Within minutes of the drop in service Twitter was awash with users reporting problems in getting their email.

"Another Gmail fail? Or is it just me? I can't get onto it on Safari or Firefox", questioned one Pocket-lint follower.

"argh no gmail - twitter it is!" said another.

Google hasn't given a reason for the break in service as yet and the system seems to be back to normal.

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

In February the Gmail outage that left users of the free webmail service without access to their accounts for around 2 hours blaming the incident on a "routine maintenance event in one of our European data centers".

Cruz assured users at the time that that the bugs have been "found and fixed".

For updates on the situation, Google recommends users visit the Apps Status Dashboard at http://www.google.com/appsstatus#