Access to Google’s Web-based email service went down at approximately 1:30 a.m. Pacific Time this morning. This problem is affecting what the engineers call a ’small subset of users,’ which seems to include just about everyone around the world.

Upon trying to log in, users are getting a 502 Server Error displayed on their screens asking them to try again in 30 seconds. After six hours, even the engineers aren’t quite sure what the problem is.

Google engineers posted a status message on the Gmail message board at 5:46 a.m. that reads as such:

We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Gmail. We will provide an update by February 24, 2009 6:30 a.m. PST detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change

Gmail has been growing rapidly in recent years and threatening the venerable older services such as Yahoo and Hotmail. Many businesses have also come to rely on the service for free business class email.

Email is still the cornerstone of how people communicate on the Internet. Therefore it’s not terribly surprising that panic is ensuing on virtually every major tech blog this morning.

Sure, it can be worrisome to lose access to your email Inbox for a few hours. Somehow this is reminiscent of an Internet outage cited in the The Onion movie, which threatened to plunge the world into productivity.

If you truly need your Gmail fix now, you can still get your messages through any POP or IMAP client that you had set up prior. Otherwise, it might be hard to turn on POP access without being able to access your account settings.

The good news is that your email is still there and it’s not a matter of data loss. The bad news is that nobody has a clue when we can get our next Gmail fix.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 10:36 am under Google, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Jeyes.
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