Oh Gmail, Where Art Thou?

No, the seventh seal of Hell has not opened up. Gmail was simply down for a while.

Although you would have thought that the world was ending from various posts and tweets we’ve seen around the internet.

Trying to open Gmail resulted in a “502 Server Error: The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.” Other Google services, such as Search, Reader, etc., seemed to be unaffected.

While Gmail outages aren’t really a new thing, this was the first time it had happened since offline support was added. This actually caused a few people not to realize there was even an issue — until they tried to send a message.  Google also experienced a few other issues yesterday, to boot.

Here is the official word from Google on the matter, although everything seems to be working again now:

The Gmail outage that affected many consumers and Google Apps users worldwide is now over. Users should find that they’re able to access their email now without any further problems.

Before you can access your Gmail, you may be asked to fill in what’s called a ‘CAPTCHA’ which asks you to type in a word or some letters before you can proceed. This is perfectly normal when you repeatedly request access to your email account, so please do go through the extra step – it’s just to verify you are who you say you are.

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.

What can we learn from today’s outage? It’s important to know that there are alternate ways to access Gmail and you should enable POP and IMAP, even if you don’t intend to use them regularly.