UPDATE:Google Gmail Users Hit With Another Service Disruption
September 24 2009 - 2:16PM
Dow Jones News
Google Inc. (GOOG) said Thursday a service disruption that
affected a small subset of Gmail users "should be resolved."
The Internet giant did not immediately provide details about the
cause or the scope of the disruption, which lasted for a few hours
and was the second outage to hit the popular email service this
month.
"A problem with Google Contacts caused many Gmail users to
experience slowness and degraded service for about an hour today.
Mail was back to full speed for everyone around 8 a.m. Pacific and
the issue affecting Contacts was resolved shortly after," a Google
spokesperson said in an email.
The company acknowledged the issue at about 7:30 a.m. Pacific
time (10:30 a.m. EDT) and provided readers with a work-around
solution to access their accounts.
The disruption follows similar issues that have affected Gmail
users in recent months. In February, Google mail users around the
world were locked out of their accounts for up to 24 hours after
the company introduced new software that triggered a bug in the
email program's code.
Gmail went down for about an hour and 45 minutes on Sept. 1,
during which time users could access their email only through
third-party applications such as Microsoft Outlook. A company
executive apologized after that incident in a blog post, saying the
outage was "a Big Deal."
The latest service glitch, while apparently much smaller than
earlier outages, will likely increase concerns about the
reliability of Web-based software, which Google is promoting as an
alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) packaged products.
Shares in Google were down $2.55, or 0.6%, at $495.70.
-By Scott Morrison, Dow Jones Newswires; 415-765-6118;
scott.morrison@dowjones.com