After Google Gmail experienced a temporary outage that cut off e-mail service to a small number of users, Google reports that it has restored service to the majority of affected Gmail users. A small subset will need to wait until March 11 to use the e-mail application. This follows a much larger February outage that left users in the United States and parts of Europe and Asia without Gmail.Google
Gmail experienced a minor outage at around 5 a.m.
EDT on the morning of March 10
that affected a small number of users.
"We were able to restore access for the vast majority of affected users
in about half an hour," Andrew Kovacs, a Google spokesperson, said in an
e-mail.
An update on the Google Apps Status Dashboard noted that service would be
restored for the remaining "small subset of users of Google Mail at March 11, 2009 9:30:00 AM UTC-4."
The service interruption was minor compared with an outage last month. On
the morning of Feb. 24, Gmail
service went down for nearly 2.5 hours in the United
States and parts of Europe
and Asia. That followed an August 2008 outage that took
Gmail down for 15 hours.
In the wake of the February service outage, Google
offered 15 days of free service to enterprise customers and others paying
$50 per year for the expanded versions of Gmail and Google Apps.
Google has been working to make its Gmail
service a more robust and enterprise-ready messaging and collaboration tool.
On top of adding applications such as Google Calendar and chat features, Google
on Jan. 27 enabled offline use of Gmail, putting it in a competitive
space with Microsoft, Yahoo Zimbra and other e-mail clients that already
offered offline access.