Gmail goes down for small number of users, usual panic follows

[ClayMation]

Google this morning acknowledged service disruptions in Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Docs. Although Google said "less than 0.007 percent of the Google Mail user base" was unable to access Gmail, the outage sure seems like it has been affecting more people than that.

Google listed six affected products: Gmail, Google Drive, Google Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, and the Google Apps administration panel for business customers. No problems were reported with Google Calendar and Google Talk. The Gmail disruption was acknowledged by Google just before 9am ET, with acknowledgements of other service problems happening around the same time.

The Gmail, Drive, Docs, Spreadsheets, and Presentations problems were classified as "service disruptions," while the Admin control panel problem was called a "service outage" by Google. The administration panel "issue is affecting a significant subset of users," Google said.

Gmail was the only service for which Google provided a numerical estimate of affected users. Google said last year that Gmail has more than 425 million active users worldwide. With 0.007 percent of users affected, that would be 29,750 people unable to access e-mail.

Empirical evidence suggests that all 29,750 of those people have tweeted about the outage multiple times. The horror was palpable: "I realised that Gmail was down when I hadn't had an email from LinkedIn for twenty minutes," one user said. "[T]his screams Apocalypse to me," said another. One panicked tech writer went so far as to say that the Google Drive outage "remind[s] me why the cloud can be quite a stupid idea."

If you can withstand the graphic nature of these tweets, searching Twitter for "Gmail down" will give you a sense of just what happens when Google services are unavailable to even a small number of users.

I haven't had any problems with Google services myself this morning, although some Ars writers did have trouble accessing Gmail.

For those feeling the pain, it should subside shortly. In its latest update, Google said "Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future." Similar messages of hope were provided regarding Drive and Google Docs. Google is still investigating the admin panel outage and hasn't said when service might be restored.

- Arstechina

[Rob]

If I lost access to Gmail, I would shit a brick. Google has way too much of my personal info to just fade out like this.