Google confirms Gmail service disruptions

Google has confirmed what many of its users have already been painfully aware of: Gmail is down.

“We are currently experiencing an issue with some Google services. For everyone who is affected, we apologize for any inconvenience you may be experiencing,” a company spokesperson told VentureBeat.

While the service seems to have been restored to at least some users, Google’s App Status dashboard says the company is still investigating the reports.

Gmail service disruptions aren’t at all unprecedented, but what’s notable in this case is that some users have reported instability with Google’s Chrome browser as well. As some have speculated, it’s possible that Gmail’s issues have caused problems for users whose Chrome browsers sync with their Google accounts.

If this is true, it exposes a major flaw in how the Google browser hooks into Google’s servers. While this is conjecture at present, the post-mortem for today’s outage should be particularly interesting.

Photo: Meghan Kelly/VentureBeat