An official Google dashboard acknowledged the problem at 12:30 p.m. EST, though a flurry of tweets and Google Plus posts seem to indicate that the issues started hours earlier. That dashboard said that the problem "should be resolved" as of 1:10 p.m., and Gmail seemed to be working fine for this reporter as of about 1:30 p.m. Google also said that a Google Drive outage has occurred and since been fixed, but it's unclear whether it was related to the Gmail problem.
Unsurprisingly, the reactions on Twitter and Google Plus were immediate, though relatively muted in comparison to some other service outages. Alice Lee tweeted, "Every other moment: I hate email, I have like 2000 unread, why do we even bother anymore? Right now: oh God GMAIL IS DOWN WHAT DO WE DO," while James Bedell went with a simple "obligatory gmail freak-out tweet."
In contrast to Twitter, the bulk of the reaction on Google Plus was a little more genuinely annoyed. Android Central said, "Gmail is down and there's not a damn thing you can do about it," and Brooke Brown said, "Umm, so Gmail being down, does NOT help my stress level."
Derek De La Cruz went for the full freak-out with "AHHHHHHH!!!! Whats happening to Google Chrome? Google+ & Gmail Chat not loading. Gmail & Search is painfully SLOW. Co-Workers Google Chrome just crashed... followed by mine. AHhh the world is ending." (No, Mr. De La Cruz was not the only one to make apocalypse references in relation to the problem, in case you were wondering.)
While Gmail outages have been less common of late than they were during the product's earlier years, they're still not unknown -- an April event may have affected as many as 30 million customers, while another problem in June was less serious, though still widespread.
