GMail is Down…But Still Accessible for Some Users

This afternoon reports started popping up on Twitter and blogs that Gmail is experiencing a major outage. Obviously not having access to your email can squash productivity.

As more and more businesses and consumers put their digital lives in the “cloud” they risk being separated from their valuable information from time to time. Many users don’t have local copies of any of their emails, instead relying completely on web-browser access.

Fortunateley, it appears that Gmail’s IMAP service is still working, which means users can still send and receive emails using a desktop email application.

Google has appeared to have resolved the 9/1/09 outage. In a blog post, Google wrote:

Update (2:37 pm): We’ve fixed the issue, and Gmail should be back up and running as usual. We’re still investigating the root cause of this outage, and we’ll share more information soon. Thanks for bearing with us.

We know many of you are having trouble accessing Gmail right now — we are too, and we definitely feel your pain. We don’t usually post about minor issues here (the Apps status dashboard and the Gmail Help Center are usually where this kind of information goes). Because this is impacting so many of you, we wanted to let you know we’re currently looking into the issue and hope to have more info to share here shortly. If you have IMAP or POP set up already, you should be able to access your mail that way in the meantime. We’re terribly sorry for the inconvenience and will get Gmail back up and running as soon as possible.

Setting up IMAP access is very easy to do. For full instructions, visit this Google tutorial page.

Google has listed the Google Mail service outage on its Apps Status Dashboard.

In addition to Gmail, Google hosts business email users that use their own domain names. Business email seems to be functioning fine according to some customers.

We will update this as we find out more about what’s going on.