For two and one-half hours early this morning (local time), Google‘s e-mail service was unavailable; the company blames an undescribed technical error.
According to a Google blog post from Gmail Site Reliability Manager Acacio Cruz,
SEE RELATED:
The outage itself lasted approximately two and a half hours from 9.30am GMT. We know that for many of you this disrupted your working day. We’re really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could. Our priority was to get you back up and running. Our engineers are still investigating the root cause of the problem.
Obviously we’re never happy when outages occur, but we would like to stress that this is an unusual occurrence. We know how important Gmail is to you, and how much people rely on the service.
That sort-of says it all, I believe. Many of us are highly dependent on Gmail, and when it’s out, it’s a bummer. But for those in the Eastern U.S., the outage was over by about 7 a.m., making it largely a non-issue.
Now, where DID I put that BlackBerry?
