Topic: Google's Gmail returns to normal after 4hr outage

[Samker]

Visitors to Google's Gmail service are being greeted with server errors when trying to access their mail accounts this morning.

It's not yet known what the exact issue is but Gmail officials have confirmed they are aware of the web outage and the company is "trying to fix it asap". Google Search is currently unaffected. Many users are reporting IMAP services and POP3 services seem to be unaffected.

This is the second outage to hit Google in a month. Late January the Google Search service was offline for up to 1hr when a human error marked all search results as malicious.

Update: According to Google's support page the problem occurred at 1:30AM Pacific Time and the company is "working hard to resolve this". Currently the service has been unavailable for nearly 3 hours.

Update 2: Google have now confirmed the outage is over. "The problem is now resolved and users have had access restored. We know how important Gmail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologize for the inconvenience."

(NeoWin)