Google apologises for Gmail outage

Web giant Google says sorry after millions of users were left without mail service Gmail for nearly two hours


Google: its Gmail service is used by nearly 150 million users worldwide

Google has apologised after its Gmail service was knocked offline for almost two hours yesterday.

The company admitted the failure of Gmail on Tuesday evening was a "big deal" for a "majority" of its millions of domestic and business users.

Google said the outage was caused when some of its servers were taken offline for routine maintenance and its other computers became overloaded with traffic. It said it would to do everything to ensure that the problem did not happen again.

According to the New York Times blog Gadgetwise, Google engineers faced extra difficulties in fixing the problem because the company uses Gmail internally.

It was the third Gmail outage this year, after four hours in February and 20 minutes in May.

The free version of Gmail is the world's third most popular email program with about 149 million users worldwide in June, ranking behind the free email services offered by Microsoft and Yahoo, according to data from comScore.

Businesses are increasingly using Google's services because they are delivered over the internet instead of being managed in-house. That can save companies money and buy them more storage than they could otherwise afford. But many companies are sceptical about outsourcing such critical tasks.

Google argues that web-based services are more reliable than those handled in-house, but big outages like yesterday's add another challenge to selling Gmail services to business.

Despite the outage, Gmail is generally regarded well by web users. According to analysis by Sysomos yesterday, 36% of social media users regarded Gmail in a positive way, 44% were neutral and only 20% negative.