Although a number of Google services went down for longer than an hour on Friday – the outage started at about 2:15 p.m. ET and ended at about 3:30 p.m. ET – it was the absence of Gmail that seems to have hit internet users the hardest.
Google responded to a SCMagazine.com request for comment by referring to the Apps Status Dashboard, which shows that Google's Mail, Calendar, Talk, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Sites and Groups services were all impacted during that time.
“The problem with Gmail should be resolved,” the message states on the Apps Status Dashboard for Gmail. “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.”
However, at least one problem, that seems to be associated with Gmail, still persisted following the Google announcement.
A Hotmail user named David Peck reported to TechCrunch on Friday that, on Thursday, he began receiving roughly 500 emails an hour that were blank and contain no subjects.
Although it was unable to be reproduced as of 5 p.m. ET on Friday, the influx of mail for Peck appears to stem from an issue when ‘Email' was clicked beneath the first result following a Google search of ‘Gmail.' Doing so brought up a blank, subject-less email that was preloaded with Peck's Hotmail address.
