Gmail Outage Appears to Be Fixed

Many users of Google's free e-mail service were stranded Tuesday afternoon when they logged on to find the service no longer working.

According to research firm ComScore, the Gmail service, launched in 2004, has nearly 146 million users worldwide -- so when Google admits that an issue with the service is affecting "a majority of users," that's a not-insignificant portion of Web users.

By Tuesday evening, the search engine company appeared to have fixed the problem as users of communications services like Twitter reported that they were able to access their e-mail again. Google's own site, however, reported that the e-mail service was still undergoing a "disruption."

On Google's blog, engineering director David Besbris observed his colleagues at the search engine company were having difficulties with the service Tuesday.

"We know many of you are having trouble accessing Gmail right now," he wrote. "We are too, and we definitely feel your pain."

Besbris did not identify the problem, which he characterized as "minor."

For Gmail users, it was a bumpy couple of days. On a Web page where Google tracks the status of its services, the company said that "some users" were having difficulty logging on Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning.

On Tuesday afternoon, the company posted another update, this time saying that "a majority of users" were experiencing problems with the service. The company alternately described the problem as an "outage" and a "disruption" -- that latter term was the one Google used later on in the afternoon when many users reported being able to log on again.

A news item about the outage posted to The Washington Post's Web site drew complaints from around the world. Some complained that the service's glitch would have a negative impact on their workday. On Twitter, naturally, the outage was a major topic of conversation.

"It's like worse than a power outage," wrote one user of both services.