Google’s Email, Gmail, Having Major Issues

Aug 11, 2008 at 5:21pm ET by Barry Schwartz

It is not uncommon for Gmail (Google Email) users to complain about outages and issues with sending and receiving email. But right now, there are hundreds of Gmail users complaining that Gmail is down or simply not sending or receiving emails.

A current search at Twitter on Gmail will return hundreds of messages with Gmail complaints. I am personally receiving a “Temporary Error (502)” and was receiving other weird errors when trying the Gmail interface. Some are reporting that Gmail is working fine through POP and IMAP protocols, but just not via the web interface.

Currently we have no official word from Google on this outage. Keep watching the Google Groups Gmail Announcements section for a response from a Google representative.

Postscript: A Google representative has posted in the Google Groups area, saying:

The Gmail team is currently aware of a subset of users being affected by the 502 error on login. Our engineers are looking into the issue and we will provide updates here as they become available.

Note: On Twitter, Evan Williams shared a tip that the HTML version of Gmail may still be accessible (for reading mail, but not replying) to those having trouble..

Postscript #2: The official Gmail blog posted an apology, saying:

Many of you had trouble accessing Gmail for a couple of hours this afternoon, and we’re really sorry. The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly. Everything should be back to normal by the time you read this.

Google also promised to do a full audit and review of the issue and move “quickly to update our [Google's] internal systems and procedures accordingly.”

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

See more articles by Barry Schwartz >

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