Google Gmail Undergoes 30 Minutes of Downtime

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.