With Gmail Down, Users Turn to Twitter

Google's popular free e-mail service experiences a rare disruption

 

Gmail, Google's ubiquitous free e-mail program, was unavailable to a majority of users for part of the afternoon on September 1—a rare disruption for the service on which many people, including the employees of entire small businesses, have come to rely. Gmail was restored shortly after 5:30 p.m. EST.

"We know many of you are having trouble accessing Gmail right now — we are too, and we definitely feel your pain," wrote David Besbris, an engineering director at Google, on the Official Gmail Blog. "Because this is impacting so many of you, we wanted to let you know we're currently looking into the issue and hope to have more info to share here shortly... We're terribly sorry for the inconvenience and will get Gmail back up and running as soon as possible."

The outage comes after a period of rapid growth for Google's e-mail service, which is among the Mountain View, California company's most popular offerings. Gmail recently surpassed AOL to become the third most popular e-mail service online, after Yahoo and Windows Live Hotmail. And last June, Google launched Gmail Labs to develop new features for Gmail. The service debuted in 2005.

Gmail's problems proved to be both a blessing and a curse for another popular web application, the microblogging site Twitter. According to TechCrunch, Gmail's woes quickly became a trending topic on Twitter, eliciting a flurry of tweets that briefly overwhelmed the system.