On Tuesday, Google said that it has resolved a problem with Gmail, due to which a significant subset of users was not able to send mails using the mailing service. This issue comes just a day after a massive global outage which affected YouTube, Gmail, and Google Drive, and while today’s issue is not nearly as severe, it is still not a good look for the company.
Downdetector.com, a website that tracks outages, indicated that more than 13,000 people were reporting issues with Gmail, including error messages and other unexpected behavior. The website reported a major spike at about 3 PM Eastern. 73% of the reported problems were with receiving messages, while 23% of users reported having trouble logging into their accounts.
On the internet network administrator outages list, admins reported that they were seeing random bounce back issues with an average of 10% bouncebacks on their test emails. Other administrators described seeing bounces while sending mails from GSuite to consumer Gmail.
Most of the bounceback error messages say, “The email account that you tried to reach does not exist”. Most reports on issues with Gmail were from the US. However, a few reports also came from Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. There have also been scattered reports of trouble with YouTube and YouTube TV, but these have not been confirmed.
Google confirmed the issue on its service dashboard at 1:30 PM Pacific time (2:59 AM IST), saying that users were seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior. However, the company was able to fix the issue by about 4:00 PM (5:21 AM IST), apologizing for the inconvenience.
“Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better,” the company added.
