Google users hit by mail outage

Business and consumer users of Google's popular e-mail service were hit by an outage on Tuesday.

The service went offline at 0930 GMT with Google saying it was "working hard to resolve this problem".

Professional users of Google mail are covered by a service level agreement that promises to be 99.9% operational in any calendar month.

More than 113 million people use Google mail worldwide, according to comScore.

In a statement, Google said "a number of users" were having problems with Google Mail.

"We know how important GMail is to our users so we take this very seriously," it added.

Google directed people to its mail support page for further status updates.

According to comScore, Google has the world's third most popular web mail service behind Hotmail with 283 million users and Yahoo with 274 million e-mail users.

Professional suite

More than a million business around the world use Google's professional suite of applications, including e-mail. Google itself relies on the service and press spokespeople for the firm were unable to e-mail journalists with statements regarding the problem.

The "premier edition" of the Apps service costs $50 (£34) per user for a year.

According to Google, its e-mail service suffered an average of 10 to 15 minutes of downtime per month in 2008.

The last outage of note was in August 2008 when users were unable to use Google Mail for "a couple of hours".

After the incident Todd Jackson, product manager for Google Mail, said in a blog post: "We're conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly."

Some users reported that Google Mail was working on G1 mobile phones, which are powered by Google's Android operating system. Google Mail also appeared to be working if accessed through a third-party mail reading program configured to send and receive e-mail using the Imap mail protocol.