Gmail down and out

GMAIL IS PROVING to be more of a G-Fail this morning, with the web based email service down worldwide for at least 30 minutes (and counting as we type).

Google has fessed up to the fact it's having "issues" but promises it is "working to resolve the problem". Luckily the phone lines weren't down.

Gurgle won't say how many people or regions are being affected by the outage, but judging by the outrage on micro-blogging sites like Twitter, the firm will need to apologise in about 50 different languages. Mon dieu!

"We know how important Gmail is to our customers, so we take issues like this very seriously" said a Google spinner who encouraged anyone affected to visit Gmail's Help Centre for updates on the situation.

Good thing the Google monster recently introduced an "offline feature", eh? µ

Update
The Official Line from Google:

If you’ve tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we’re having some problems. Shortly after 10am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email.

We’re working very hard to solve the problem and we’re really sorry for the inconvenience. Those users in the US and UK 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 emails.

We’re posting updates to the Gmail Help Centre at http://mail.google.com/support/ and Google Apps users can visit the Google Apps help centre at www.google.com/support/a.

Thanks for bearing with us while we sort this out. We'll report back as we make progress.

Posted by Acacio Cruz, Gmail Site Reliability Manager