At around 1 p.m. Pacific time, the Gmail went down due to some technical errors. It was not until 2.25 p.m. that the site normalized. As a result, it affected not only the free users of the service but also the paying ones.
It was around 1 in the afternoon when Google campaigned against Microsoft Outlook and Word and enticed other companies, which use Gmail for their communications, to stop using these applications in their respective Domains. Immediately after this Gmail went down for almost one and a half hours.
At around 12:53 p.m. a message indicating server problems was posted by Google which said "We're aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 1:53:00 PM UTC-7 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change."
It has been tough and testing times for Google's widely popular mailing site since it had launched its offline support. Gmail has had quite a few technical disruptions in the recent past. In February 2009 and May 2009 many users received the message "503 Service Unavailable" when they logged on to Gmail. Something very similar happened on Tuesday afternoon.
BBC News reports that Google's engineering director David Besbris wrote in Google's blog post on Tuesday, "We know many of you are having trouble accessing Gmail right now - we are too, and we definitely feel your pain."
Sites like You Tube and Facebook also remained unavailable. The world's third best e-mail application site after Microsoft and Yahoo caused a lot of inconvenience "to the 'majority' of its 150 million worldwide users for nearly two hours," BBC News reported.