Skip to footer

Gmail down, up, and back online again

Gmail and Chrome weathered outages and bugs earlier today. Google says it is looking into the problem. 

|
Google
Google said today that it was investigating reports of Gmail outages.
  • By Matthew Shaer

Gmail went flakey earlier this morning, sputtering out a bunch of 502 error messages, and sending legions of users onto Twitter to complain about their bad luck. (Some of Twitter messages were pretty funny.)

Meanwhile, Google's Chrome browser was also weathering some serious problems – we watched our browser crash six times in the space of an hour. Google, for its part, has listed a "service disruption" for Gmail, and promised to look into the outages. 

"We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Mail," Google reps wrote today. "We will provide more information shortly." 

Chrome is back up and running for us, as is Gmail, but Don Reisinger of CNET reports that "Gmail appears to be having some trouble making its way back for some users." 

As more and more folks crowd onto platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail – Gmail alone had 425 million regular users as of this summer – outages have become a fact of life: one of the prices we pay for constant, free access. 

Twitter, which has been more prone to crashing than other social networks, has responded by increasing the size of its data centers. 

It's worth noting that compared with Twitter, Gmail is generally pretty reliable – we run it for several hours each day, and almost never run into any service errors. Which is why we take all those tweets about the world coming to a burning, fiery end with a big old grain of salt. 

Hang tight, folks.

And in the meantime, why not follow us on Twitter? Find us @venturenaut.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Gmail down, up, and back online again
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2012/1210/Gmail-down-up-and-back-online-again
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe