Gmail experiences downtime, affects 5 million people

Google had problems yesterday with their GMAIL service and they have yet to reveal the issues which affected around 5 million people.

Google have been proud of their uptime, breaking records of 99 percent since 2007. The service was down for 2 percent of the audience yesterday, totaling around an hour.

Google techs have yet to explain what caused the downtime with a vague statement saying “We've implemented a fix and users should now be able to access their mail.  We apologize for the inconvenience.”

They announced the problems at 9.42 am Pacific time yesterday and by 10.24 am the email administrator said “Google Mail service has already been restored for some users.”

22 minutes later another message was sent, reading “The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.”

Many users reported the downtime via Google+, Twitter and Facebook platforms.

This tarnishes Google's clean record, as they have experienced downtime only once in the last three years and seven times since the service launched in 2007.

Google reported 99.894% uptime in 2010 and 99.99% uptime in 2011. By industry standards this is exceptionally good.

Kitguru says: Where you affected yesterday by the downtime?

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