(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Search engine giant Google (www.google.com) has confirmed that “a small subset of users” of Gmail have not been able to gain access to the email service, according to multiple media reports.
Just a couple weeks ago, Google’s Gmail was unavailable for approximately two and a half hours after one of its European data centers suffered an outage, affecting its more than 113 million users worldwide.
In a statement, Google confirmed that it is “aware of a problem with Gmail” and that “the team is working as quickly as they can to resolve the problem.”
According to the most recent update at 2:15 p.m. EST on Google’s Apps Status page, the company “expects to resolve the problem affecting a small subset of users of Google Mail at March 11, 2009 9:30:00 a.m. UTC-4.”
Google has yet to specify the exact number of the users affected, or when the email service will resume for said users.
Also unclear is whether the downtime is only affecting users of the free email service, or its business customers as well.
However, since Google serves all of its Gmail users from the same data center infrastructure, the outage has the potential to affect users of its free Gmail service, users of the Google Apps hosted collaboration and communication suite, and Apps Premier users.
In 2008, Google Gmail logged an average of 10 to 15 minutes of downtime per month.
