GMail Outage Anyone?

Om Malik | Wednesday, January 17, 2007 | 5:58 PM PT | 56 comments

Earlier today Jackson West, one of our writers was bemoaning the flakiness he was encountering today with his Google Mail (GMail) account. A few others said that they were having some problems, though I personally did not have any issues with the account. gmaildown.pngNevertheless it is starting to look like an epidemic. Sarah in Tampa is reporting some problems as well. Here is a screen shot a good buddy of ours emailed us. Are you experiencing problems with GMail? There has been an increased incidence of downtimes at Google’s suite of web services.

2 trackbacks so far

January 17th, 2007
11:09 PM PT

Google Calendar Down For 6+ Hours and Counting……

I’m a BIG user of Google Calendar, my whole life pretty much is schedule on there. So when google started acting up six hours ago, I didn’t think much of it. They are building those big data centers, right? Well, maybe not. There is s…

February 28th, 2007
9:54 PM PT

[...] is, however, interesting that the first issue I’ve had with Gmail is once they monetized it outside of advertising sponsored [...]

54 comments so far

January 17th, 2007
6:29 PM PT

It’s been working fine for me in both Maine this morning and NYC since about noon.

January 17th, 2007
6:31 PM PT
Eric Willis said:

I have had problems the last couple of days. No problems with any other site… however, sometimes it is just impossible for me to log into Gmail.

January 17th, 2007
6:38 PM PT
Eric Willis said:

One more thing to. Sometimes I forward emails to my hotmail account and gmail account just to save them. I noticed the ones at gmail have been arriving late sometimes..not all of them but some of them. And when I mean late.. they sometimes show in my inbox 12 hours or more later..sometimes a day later…very peculiar behavior lately on my gmail account.

January 17th, 2007
6:47 PM PT
Zoli Erdos said:

I experienced the outage, too, and found the most unexpected evidence of not being the only one: my blog referrer log. An old blog post I wrote received quite a few hits from Google search “gmail down” within an hour.

January 17th, 2007
7:31 PM PT
David said:

Might be a random coincidence, but I’ve been having intermittent problems with Google Calendar all day today.

January 17th, 2007
7:35 PM PT
ET said:

I had to go into “classic mode” yesterday but fixed itself after a few hours. Something fishy is going on over at google. I hope its just a big upgrade with a lot of new features causing the problems.

January 17th, 2007
7:39 PM PT

I have experienced a couple of very minor outages today (less than a couple of minutes each), so nothing major or out of the ordinary for gmail. Touch on wood…

January 17th, 2007
8:05 PM PT
Chris Gilmer said:

There has been some reports lately as to new vulnerabilities that open the opportunity for a malicious attacker to hijack a users Google account by stealing cookies. Google could be working on a fix for this? When Gmail goes down, you know Google is usually working on something good!
(link)

Also Google is rumored to be integrating AIM into Gtalk this year. Could explain the downtime as well.
(link)

Remember… they are STILL in beta! So i guess we cant yell at them too loudly.

January 17th, 2007
8:23 PM PT
Jay said:

Interesting. I’m using Google Apps and have yet to see a Goole Apps Gmail issue of the type I sometimes see with regular gmail.com Gmail.

January 17th, 2007
8:29 PM PT

Was not working for me here in EST most of the last afternoon.

January 17th, 2007
8:38 PM PT
Jacob Levy said:

Working fine for me all day. No problems. I’m in the San Francisco bay area.

January 17th, 2007
8:50 PM PT

I haven’t noticed any problems.

January 17th, 2007
8:56 PM PT
Rob said:

Gmail goes down for me all the time. I have 4 gmail accounts that I check 5-9 times a day each.

Why? Don’t ask.

There hasn’t been a week that has gone by that I don’t remember seeing this screen at least once.

I think this is a regular problem, it just depends on who is affected and how often.

January 17th, 2007
9:38 PM PT
kes1280 said:

Mine’s been acting up since Google did maintenance on GoogleGroups.

Historically, any time Google tweaks a program - Gmail and/or the other apps will get dodgy. It generally settles back to normal in about a week though.

Throw in the added bonus of all the ice & snow storms that hit the midwest and the impact that has on the different ISP’s - both through loss of service and the increase of usage by all the people that are housebound.

Just have patience, keep emptying your caches and Gmail & Google apps should be back in working order by next week.

January 17th, 2007
9:40 PM PT
Ed West said:

I have been having trouble with Google “Feeds In Tabs” on my Google personal page. Have been getting a server not found error. The remainder of the page comes in fine.

January 17th, 2007
11:05 PM PT
drew olanoff said:

I had about an hour outage tonight.

January 17th, 2007
11:57 PM PT
Sean Ness said:

Down for 90 minutes this afternoon in Palo Alto.

January 18th, 2007
1:05 AM PT
Jackson West said:

Wow, glad I’m not just paranoid. The other thing — is it just me, or is something effed up with YouTube, too? Their search and ‘most recent’ listings are usually three hours behind the times, and I tried to post a clip via YouTube’s ‘blog this’ to my wordpress.com blog hours ago and it still hasn’t shown up.

January 18th, 2007
2:25 AM PT
Peter said:

i’ve had issues with Calendar…

January 18th, 2007
2:53 AM PT
Bertil said:

I can’t really see on your .png, but it appears you try to connect to
(link)
GMail’s URL is
(link)

Same problem for Google Calendar. I have spend some time on Gmail Help Forum, and 90% of the problems are do either to that, or a cache problem in Firefox.

January 18th, 2007
2:57 AM PT
Bertil said:

Oh: and e-mail delays have nothing to do with Google server; they are seen on all similar services, and are related to a massive under-inverstment in broadband by gready ISPs in USA. Ask Sen. Ted Stevens: he has a great explanation on this one.

January 18th, 2007
2:58 AM PT
TamTam said:

I have from time to time there is a problem with the restoration account
I can not understand why.
And it is a very good service

January 18th, 2007
4:58 AM PT
arry said:

I from Russia. Constantly I use gmail and no problems existing, I sympathize with your problems :(

January 18th, 2007
5:23 AM PT
Jason Evans said:

My colleague had problems last night around 7 pm EST, but myself and another person in the office had no issues.

January 18th, 2007
6:49 AM PT
Tking said:

Getting a server error with Gmail here in London.

January 18th, 2007
6:50 AM PT
Sameer Vasta said:

Over the past 2 months, I’ve had periodic problems with GMail access to the point where I’ve actually thought about switching (ah, but I can’t, I know) email providers. More than just a little frustrating.

January 18th, 2007
7:06 AM PT
Doug K. said:

I have a hosted account at Google (www.google.com/hosted) and it was down last night for over an hour. I have a long commute and I usually check my email. It is worrisome because this is used for my business (Google is hosting my domain account). I am especially concerned that I may have not received certain emails. This can’t be good for businesses that rely on Google and its, supposedly highly available, systems.

January 18th, 2007
7:42 AM PT

Yes Om. I had the same page yesterday at around 7-30 pm. Within a couple of minutes the site was back on, though.

January 18th, 2007
7:53 AM PT

I have two gmail accounts, one for work and one for personal stuff. Over the past year or so, I occasionally have problems with one or the other: either I can’t get into it at all, or POP stops working for a while.

Whenever this happens, the other account is always fine, so it seems like outages (while generally rare) affect specific clusters or whatever google calls them.

It really sucks when it happens, and highlights how helpless you feel when you don’t have email working. But (for me anyway) Gmail breaks less often than when we maintained our own private email at work, and when I maintained my own personal email server. The bonus is that I don’t have to do anything except wait for them to fix it.

January 18th, 2007
7:59 AM PT
shadilac said:

Someone in the tech community is still using Internet Explorer? That’s like a stock broker driving a kia. Who is this “good buddy” of yours?

January 18th, 2007
8:57 AM PT
Eric Brown said:

Gmail was down for me (I live in Dallas) for at least 1/2 hour. I forward all my email to Gmail and now I wonder how many emails might be lost due to this outage.

January 18th, 2007
9:32 AM PT
Duncan said:

Gmail has been causing problems for me as well. Messages are being sent several hours after I sent them or not being sent at all.

(Vancouver Canada)

January 18th, 2007
11:43 AM PT
Manhattan, New York said:

Gmail has been down for me for last 10 minutes. Trying to access through google.com (vs. gmail.com) also not successful and could not actually load google products page either. Google search seems fine. Interestingly, my RSS feed to my gmail (from my Netvibes homepage) is working and telling me of my new messages.

January 18th, 2007
12:14 PM PT
Krish said:

I am facing problems with both gmail and hosted domains regularly for the past one month or so. It is very frustrating sometimes.

January 19th, 2007
6:14 AM PT
Helmut said:

Bill ODonnell, i guess you’re right - gmail outages affect some servers or clusters of google, lately i’ve experienced some downtime with google notebook too.
Well, it means one thing - backup all your google stuff, it might get lost one day ;)

January 24th, 2007
3:47 PM PT
Kimberly said:

Gmail has been down for several days for me, currently trying to log in in KS . . . it has been unbearably frustrating, as I need information such as contact phone numbers that are trapped in those emails! I am SO sick of this!

February 25th, 2007
7:48 AM PT
Denny Guymon said:

I am having problems loading gmail. It can’t bring up the website at all this is my second day. Does anyone have some Ideas of what I can do. I have checked to see if I was blocking this site and I am not. Please Help!

March 1st, 2007
11:34 AM PT
Sucheta said:

Gmail has been down for 2 days for me, currently trying to log in to my mailbox I am in BAy area . . it has been unbearably frustrating, as I am expecting a very important email :-( :-( ! What do I do?

-Thanks

March 1st, 2007
11:55 AM PT

Hi all

I haven’t been able to access my account (error codes 777, 767, 766) for the past 5 hours now. Have tried the cookie-clearing thing, and pretty much everything else. Is it just my account or a large-scale thing?

This has to happen when I’m waiting to hear from grad schools :-/

March 1st, 2007
12:12 PM PT
Lisa said:

Yes! I haven’t been able to log in to my gmail account all afternoon and have felt like I’ve lost a limb!
It’s driving me crazy! Been getting error code 767 too. Knew really it was a huge thing, but am so relieved to actually find someone else having the same problem!
Tried to contact Google, but they want the verification code in my welcome email - which - SURPRISE - is in my inbox which I can’t get to!
Lx

March 1st, 2007
12:30 PM PT
Yuizaki said:

This whole day, I’ve not been getting on Gmail. I thought it was my office but it’s not. I hope they resolve it soon.

March 1st, 2007
12:43 PM PT
Massimo said:

There is a thread about this outage on Google Groups’s Gmail Discussion Forum if you are interested. Some people say Gmail has been down only for some users, some have reported 12 hrs downtime, some others claim they have been able to check their Gmail account from their cell phones, although they couldn’t from their PCs.

Confusing and disconcerting….
I think Google should come up with some “official” announcement before too late.
– Max

March 1st, 2007
12:50 PM PT
John said:

Today, March 31, 2007, I contacted Google via another email service. They responded, “We are aware of this problem, and our engineers are working diligently to find a solution. We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have
caused.”

March 1st, 2007
12:51 PM PT
John said:

DATE CORRECTION: Today, March 1, 2007, I contacted Google via another email service. They responded, “We are aware of this problem, and our engineers are working diligently to find a solution. We apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have
caused.”

March 8th, 2007
5:09 AM PT
Steve said:

Is Youtube loading mostly blank pages for anyone else out there? I’m in Bangkok.

March 22nd, 2007
1:39 PM PT
Pat said:

I cannot access my gmail account today, Thursday, March 22, 2007.

Appreciate it if you could tell me if this a problem with my own computer or if there is a problem with gmail today.

Thank you,
Pat Baier
reach me at work email: pat.baier@cancer.org

March 27th, 2007
1:24 PM PT
J. Larson said:

I can’t access my gmail account this afternoon. This is very bad timing for me. What is going on?

March 27th, 2007
3:07 PM PT
MetaJon said:

Gmail down again…I have to take others word on that. Because today is the 1st time I’ve been unable to access the web interface. The POP service appears to be working as I am getting mail through Outlook but the web UI is not available.

MetaJon

March 30th, 2007
2:50 PM PT
jody said:

Can’t log into my gmail OR yahoo accounts for a week! Not taking correct password. What do you think?

March 31st, 2007
12:58 PM PT
Gary said:

Yes–today 3/31/2007 –been spending a great deal of time trying–this morning was on after much waiting–cannot get on at all now–from 3:30PM to 4 PM
Tried to go on google help–that opened but was not very responsive-like only part open.No help.

April 1st, 2007
7:53 PM PT
Chris said:

I have not been able to access my google account since yesterday. This sucks

June 6th, 2007
4:52 AM PT
Moawia Khalid Himmo said:

The Gmail service was very bad for the last 2-3 weeks…impossible to open without trying 50 times…then I get fedup…and go to yahoo…!

July 25th, 2007
10:21 PM PT
Cyril (Bangkok) said:

gmail…….hasn’t worked for me for a week now?????

April 18th, 2008
10:22 AM PT
Cricket said:

I have not been able to access gmail from my laptop since Tuesday, 4/15. I can access it from my Sprint and Verizon phones though. I’m seriously hacked off by this. :-( I can not access blogspot either.

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