Gmail's bounced back from its recent multihour outage, but questions over what went wrong are thus far unanswered. The Google mail service was offline from about 4:30 a.m. until 7:00 a.m. ET (or from 9:30 a.m. till noon for nations on Greenwich Mean Time). Google says it is now "investigating the root cause" of the issue.


Gmail Outages Over Time

While "frequent" would probably be an exaggeration when it comes to describing Gmail outages, "unusual" might be missing the mark by a hair, too. In the past six months, Gmail has suffered some form of downtime on five separate occasions before this week's incident:

• July 16, 2008: A similar "502 error" struck Gmail, leading to what was described as a "long outage" by affected users.

• August 6, 2008: Technical trouble knocked an "undetermined number" of Gmail users (including both regular users and paying Google Apps clients) out of their mail for about 15 hours.

• August 11, 2008: An issue with Google's "contacts system" caused Gmail access to go offline for a "couple of hours" for numerous users. Both individual accounts and Google Apps accounts were affected again.

• August 15, 2008: The third outage within a span of two weeks left users locked out of their accounts for more than 24 hours. That pesky "502 server error" popped up on the Gmail login page here, too.

• October 16, 2008: Users went a full 30 hours without access. Google didn't elaborate on what caused the issue.


So, my final thought: Gmail was down. But outages occur anywhere you go, and worse things could happen and 's be honest with each other here.