Wednesday, 18 April 2012
The free Google email service now has 350 million users in 54 languages. So when it experienced an outage that affected a small subset of users for around half an hour Tuesday, the resulting cacophony on Twitter read like the end of the world. According to Google, the problem affected roughly 2% of all Gmail users. (Anecdotally, that sounds about right.
But 2% of 350 million is still a whole lot of upset, especially when it comes to a service that seems to govern all its users’ Instant Messages as well as vital email. Many services we can live without for 30 minutes of our work day; Gmail, apparently, is not one of them. Users trying to access gmail are receiving a servor error, the Numeric Code is 93. The first outages seem to have occurred at approximately 12:50am EST. At the time of this writing over 20 minutes later, the problem still is being reported. Right now there is no word on the cause. The hacker group known an Annonymous has never threatened to take down gmail.
