Gmail goes down for a second consecutive day

On Monday, several of Google's apps and web sites like YouTube, Drive, Gmail, and others went down. This left a large number of global users unable to communicate, stream videos, and more. Google blamed the problem on "an authentication system outage for approximately 45 minutes due to an internal storage quota issue." Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that for the second consecutive day, Gmail could not be accessed by a large number of users due to a technical issue. A Google spokeswomen had said on Monday that "We apologize to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future." On Tuesday, the very next day, the problem recurred. Messages being sent were bouncing back to the sender stating "The email account that you tried to reach does not exist."

Google first reported that Gmail had stopped working again on Tuesday at 4:29 pm ET. On Google's Status Dashboard, the company wrote, "We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior." Finally, at 6:51 pm ET (after two hours and 22 minutes of down time), Google posted that "The problem with Gmail has been resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better. If you are still experiencing an issue, please contact us via the Google Help Center. Affected users received a bounce notification with the error 'The email account that you tried to reach does not exist' after sending an email to addresses ending in @gmail.com." On its website Google wrote, "We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.”

According to DownDetector, 17,000 complaints from Gmail users were reported to the website on Tuesday. While most of the issues with Gmail were taking place in the U.S., these problems were also affecting users in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. 73% could not sign in to Gmail. Perhaps on Wednesday Gmail will reward users by staying up all day.