Turns Out EVERYONE Had a Gmail Blackout!

From the New York Times:

August 11, 2008, 6:26 pm
A Modern-Day Blackout: Gmail Goes Dark

By Miguel Helft

UPDATED 6:35 p.m. After about 90 minutes, Gmail came back to life for most users.

My colleague Brad Stone recently wrote about the annoyances tied to persistent system outages at popular Web services of technology stalwarts like Amazon, Yahoo and Research in Motion. It’s now Google’s turn, as Gmail, the company’s popular Web e-mail service, has been down for a very large number of users for about an hour or so.

Type “mail.google.com” into http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ and you’ll get confirmation that if you have Gmail problems, you are not alone.

One of the best places to track the outage is Twitter. Users are venting their frustrations about Gmail being down — at a rate of 100 or so messages per minute. As a user who calls himself dashmybuttons said, “it’s like a neighborhood blackout, now everyone’s out in the street trying to assess what went wrong.”

I called a Google spokesman, who said he would check and get back to me. For a company that is trying to pitch its Web applications to business customers, not to mention millions of individual users, this can’t be good news.

For some users, an HTML version of Gmail partially works at http://mail.google.com/mail/h

UPDATE: A Google spokesman confirmed the outage and said the company’s engineers were investigating its cause.