Gmail outage lasts 4 hours

Google have stated that today's Gmail outage lasted about 2 and a half hours, which is about the duration of my own outage.

In some cases though it seems that users were without Gmail for up to 4 hours, right in the middle of the European working day - which is not good for corporates who have outsourced their e-mail to Google.

Gmail's site reliability manager Acacio Cruz said in a blog post:

"The outage itself lasted approximately two and a half hours from 9.30am GMT. We know that for many of you this disrupted your working day. We’re really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could. Our priority was to get you back up and running. Our engineers are still investigating the root cause of the problem.

Obviously we’re never happy when outages occur, but we would like to stress that this is an unusual occurrence. We know how important Gmail is to you, and how much people rely on the service."

Details are still yet to become apparent on what exactly went wrong.