Gmail turns into ‘Gfail’

NEW DELHI - Google’s popular email service Gmail, which has over a 110 million users worldwide, went offline at around 2 p.m. Tuesday, affecting users throughout the world, especially in Europe and India.

In a statement, Google said ‘a number of users’ were having problems with Google Mail.

‘We know how important Gmail is to our users, so we take this very seriously,’ it added.

Apparently users accessing the web version of the email were experiencing problems, with the POP (post office protocol) downloading and mobile access through iPhone and Google’s own G1 still working fine.

Users worldwide resorted to twitter, the Gmail thread registering about 100 tweets per second, to discuss the problems.

‘Gmail is getting HTTP:502 errors from Gmail. Anyone else got this or does it just hate me today?’ said a post on the twitter thread by sciamachy (screen name).

Not just that, another thread by the name of gfail was getting constant updates on the gmail snag.

‘Trouble In The Clouds: Gmail Turns Into Gfail,’ crazyengineer posted on his tweet.

‘We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a number of users. This problem occurred at approximately 1.30 a.m. Pacific Time. We’re working hard to resolve this problem and will post updates as we have them,’ Google posted on its support page.

‘We apologise for any inconvenience that this has caused,’ it added.

This is Google’s second major technical failure in less than a month. In January, all Google search results were affected by what Google called a ‘manual failure’ returning malware errors to every search query.