Gmail goes down, and the Internet freaks out

Update: Gmail problems had cleared up by 12:23 p.m. Pacific, Google said. Earlier, at around 11:22 a.m. Pacific, Gmail inboxes became visible again about 20 minutes after the downtime began, although some functions still didn’t work. By 12:25 p.m. Pacific, Google had resolved issues with its Calendar, Talk, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Sites, Groups, and Voice services. By 12:51 p.m. Pacific, Google+ Hangouts had returned. At around 4:45 p.m. Pacific, the company posted an explanation for the outages.

Google just hit a few infrastructure roadblocks today as Gmail and a host of other services are down.

The outage has lasted for more than 15 minutes now. Along with Gmail, Google Plus doesn’t work. Hangouts doesn’t work. Google Voice might be running into issues, too.

Other Google apps for business, including Calendar, Drive, and Analytics, seem to be working. Google Voice service is intermittent.

The Google Apps Status Dashboard shows Google was working on the Google outage: “We’re investigating reports of an issue with Gmail. We will provide more information shortly,” Google said at 11:12 a.m. Pacific. The acknowledgment came about 10 minutes after the outage started.

After the outage began, people tweeted out silly things about Gmail specifically, like this:

https://twitter.com/jonfortt/status/426795358145228800
https://twitter.com/jswartz/status/426796170833166336
https://twitter.com/jwherrman/status/426794023777742848
This might not bode well for Google as it aims to get more businesses using its cloud services.

Dropbox had an outage recently.