Google's GMail service suffers disruption

Google's GMail service suffers disruption inShare9Share this Email Print Related NewsGoogle to charge small businesses for Web-based Apps software Thu, Dec 6 2012 In brewing rivalry, Instagram trims ties to Twitter Wed, Dec 5 2012 Student group takes Facebook privacy gripes to court Tue, Dec 4 2012 Facebook to share data with Instagram, loosen email rules Wed, Nov 21 2012 RPT-Petraeus case shows ease of government email snooping Sat, Nov 17 2012Analysis & OpinionCounterparties: 43 words you can’t say on Facebook Fake press releases are a public service Related TopicsTech » Media » A neon Google logo is seen at the new Google office in Toronto, November 13, 2012. Credit: Reuters/Mark Blinch SAN FRANCISCO | Mon Dec 10, 2012 2:17pm EST SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Several Google Inc Web products, including the popular GMail service, appeared to go dark for users on several continents on Monday. Google confirmed that "service disruptions" had affected GMail and Google Drive, its online storage service. The two products are part of Google's Apps suite, a Microsoft Office rival that caters to both consumers and businesses. By 10:10 a.m. Pacific Time (18:10 GMT), Google's Apps Dashboard monitoring service reported that GMail and Drive service had resumed. The company did not specify how many users were affected, or where, but the outage prompted widespread complaints on social media on both coasts in the U.S. and other major markets, from the United Kingdom to Brazil. Some users additionally reported that the outage had affected Google Docs, the company's word-processing and spreadsheet programs, while Chrome, Google's Internet browser, also crashed unexpectedly. "We are currently experiencing an issue with some Google services," Google spokeswoman Andrea Freund said in a statement. "For everyone who is affected, we apologize for any inconvenience you may be experiencing." Firmly entrenched in the consumer market, GMail is one of Google's most popular and important product offerings. The search giant, which has been pushing a corporate version of the email service and its Apps suite to businesses to compete with Microsoft, said this month that the package will no longer be free to business customers. (Reporting By Gerry Shih; Editing by Andrew Hay and Nick Zieminski) ===== Devin Coldewey, NBC News Facebook 'back to 100 percent' after outage Advertise | AdChoices Devin Coldewey / NBC News A number of Facebook users found themselves unable to access the social network Monday for a short time, but things are now back to normal, the company said. The outage started in the early afternoon and lasted, for some, at least an hour. For many, the site was down completely, while others saw only missing images. Subdomains like beta.facebook.com worked correctly, allowing people to access the site even when www.facebook.com would not load. Frustrated users took to blogs and services like Twitter to vent, also demonstrating the the outage, while fairly short, occurred in a number of countries worldwide. An unrelated issue caused Gmail and Google Drive to be unavailable this morning, making it something of a rocky day for those who rely heavily on the Web apps. A Facebook spokesperson issued the following statement to NBC News in an email: Earlier today we made a change to our DNS infrastructure and that change resulted in some people being temporarily unable to reach the site. We detected and resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100 percent. We apologize for any inconvenience. DNS is the system by which clients and servers on the Web keep track of each other, and is occasionally the source of short outages like this one. It can also be deliberately disrupted by hackers, but that's not what happened Monday. Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. His personal website is coldewey.cc. Tags: Internet , Facebook , social-network , dns , outage