Go Ahead, Try Googling 'Gmail Outage'
The Official Google Blog confirmed the outage with a post earlier today.
"If you've tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we're having some problems. Shortly after 9:30 a.m. GMT, our monitoring system, alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their e-mail," wrote Acacio Cruz, Gmail Site Reliability Manager.
Google is aware of the problem and is working to fix it. Meanwhile, the search engine giant apologized to Gmail users, noting that a recently released Google Gears function, Gmail Offline, will still allow users to access their Gmail inbox but not anything more than that.
"We're working very hard to solve the problem and we're really sorry for the inconvenience. Those users in the U.S. and U.K. who have enabled Gmail offline through Gmail Labs should be able to access their inbox, although they won't be able to send or receive e-mails," wrote Cruz.
Gmail has been widely adopted over the past few years. While users oftentimes praise the size of its storage and the functionalities that have been added to it—think Gmail Labs, Google Chat, etc.—the product is still in beta.
That beta status means that Google doesn't have to support Gmail the way it would a product that has been officially released.
For users anxious to check the status of the fix, Google is offering two Web sites. The Gmail Help Centre and Google Apps Help Centre are both available for Gmail users waiting for the Web-based email service to come back online.