Google apologized to Gmail users for a prolonged Google Mail outage, which blocked access to millions of consumer and business accounts Tuesday afternoon.
Google said that it fixed the issue, but was still determining the root cause of the outage. "We're terribly sorry for the inconvenience and will get Gmail back up and running as soon as possible," Google said in a blog post.
Starting at about 1 p.m. PST, a majority of Google's millions of e-mail users received error messages when they attempted to access consumer Gmail and Google Apps accounts.
The outage also affected internal systems at the company. "We know many of you are having trouble accessing Gmail right now -- we are too, and we definitely feel your pain," Google said in a blog post.
Google said it was investigating the issue and would restore service as soon as possible.
"Because this is impacting so many of you, we wanted to let you know we're currently looking into the issue and hope to have more information to share here shortly," Google said.
While Google said the outage affected "the majority" of its millions of users, not all users were blocked from their Gmail accounts. Users running third-party e-mail software IMAP or POP were more likely to access their Gmail accounts, Google said.
In the meantime, Gmail users took to Twitter and other blog sites to express their frustrations about being blocked from their e-mail accounts.
An update later appeared on the Google Apps status dashboard alerting users that some service had been restored and a full restoration was on its way.
"Google mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future," Google said.
This is not the first time that Gmail has suffered from downtime. Millions of Gmail users in Europe, Asia and the U.S. were denied access to their e-mail accounts in February following an outage.
In May, the search engine giant suffered a global blackout that cut millions of users off from its search engine and e-mail accounts, as well as other online services.
