It's not the first Gmail outage I've experienced, but it's the most serious. Monday morning is, of course, the worst time for a mail service to bomb out. This household's two Gmail accounts have both been inaccessible all morning.
Gmail Down?
Reader Comments
(Page 1)3. Maybe it's not a 404, but it's showing up as one. I agree that as beta, there needs to be more feedback give -- I've hit some "snags" and have been guilty of not reporting 'em, too.
I just want gmail back up!
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Kaffene
4. Have been unable to access Gmail for about 45minutes as of 9:20 AM Friday 11/12/04
Eternal "loading" page, firewall indicator shows no inbound traffic. Had worked perfectly since installation a couple of months ago. I have not experienced any other outages and I use the service several times a day as Gmail is now my primary email service.
I used an alternate email address above.
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Tom Bales
5. Found an offsite email address for gmail support so sent them a rundown on not being able to access the service. Their reply doesn't offer a whole lot since it reqires accessing the account and going to help or changing the password (???)and the problem is that I CAN'T access the account. It doesn't do much good to be a beta tester if you can't get to the foks in charge to tell them somethings wrong or even ask if something's wrong. Their reply to me follows:
Hello,
Thanks for contacting us. We aren't able to respond directly to inquiries
submitted to this email address.
If you are a Gmail user, please log in to your account and visit our Help
Center by clicking 'Help' at the top of any Gmail page. If the information
you are looking for is not covered in our Help Center, you can submit a
request by clicking 'Contact Us' on the left side of any Help Center page.
This helps us route your inquiry so you can receive more information
specific to your issue.
If you are unable to log in to your Gmail account, please follow the steps
to reset your password by clicking 'Forgot your password?' on
http://gmail.google.com.
Finally, if you don't have a Gmail account, you can find responses to
common inquiries at the end of this message.
Sincerely,
The Gmail Team
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Tom Bales
6. Okay its sunday at 7 pm EST and I can not get to my gmail? okay this isnt the first time but i am about fedup with it. Is there any thing that I can do to voice my opinion on this? Hummm after a few clicks it seems that I cant... Well it looks like its time to break down and start hosting my own domain.....
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Gregg
7. This is what i get, and it seems to be the same thing as supplied at the first page...
Server Error
Gmail is temporarily unavailable. Cross your fingers and try again in a few minutes. We're sorry for the inconvenience
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Pedro Arieira
8. I started using gmail about 2 weeks ago. I'm trying to sign in now and I'm getting "Sorry, service is currently not available. Please try again later."
This is not good. And I was starting to have some faith. Oh well, back to crappy old version of Imail.
Geoff
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Geoff
9. Well, gmail is down again. Dec. 2. For at least 10 minutes. I'm still trying ...
NOT ACCETPTABLE!
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by me
10. It's back up again.
?
Also, someone had said try Firefox instead of IE. It didn't work either. Works well though, thanks.
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Geoff
11. Unable to access acount all day yesterday & today & on & off Friday. I had this problem once before. It took a few days & they finally fixed it. Never did find out the problem. But since I couldn't do anything to fix it, they had to. And I never found a way to contact them when this happens. they don't even mention it on their news site.
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Jerry Pierce
12. Unable to access acount all day yesterday & today & on & off Friday. I had this problem once before. It took a few days & they finally fixed it. Never did find out the problem. But since I couldn't do anything to fix it, they had to. And I never found a way to contact them when this happens. They don't even mention it on their news site. Also I tried to post this message using my gmail address. But, in a catch 22, I have to respond to an email befor this is posted. Good thing I still have another email account THAT WORKS!
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Jerry Pierce
13. Ok, so the last couple weeks I've noticed that my gmail account password gets messed up. The last two or three times, I went in and it asked me to complete some questions, and then they sent me a password reset link. Yesterday, I was unable to access it again, due to the password, (even thought I never changed it) and now it keeps asking me for the first phone number. I know this is a security measure, but it certainly isn't the security option I picked to have them ask me. I am really pissed off because I have an interview with a company and they are corresponding to my gmail address, and now I cannot get into it to get directions to the bloody place!
Now that yahoo has bumped to 250MB free space, I'm switching back because this is complete crap.
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Nate
15. It’s been over a week now, and my Gmail account is still unusable because messages are not getting through to me. I’ve written 4 emails to them so far regarding this problem (with another address of course) and have yet to receive a response.
I am really pissed off at Google right now. I use that address for everything, and now no one has a way to contact me.
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Steven Hyde
16. It's back! Somehow a filter got created to automaticly move every message containing a subject to the trash! How stupid.
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Steven Hyde
17. getting the "loading..." message again. two days now. But... I have the gmail notice installed, and it is telling me how many messages (now 27) that I have, but cannot access. I am sure these guys will work this out, but when?
Steven in China
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Steven Plummer
18. I figured out how to get in.
in the address it says http://mail.google.com/gmail
and LOADING...
go to the address and delete the gmail portion and the dropdown box will show all the login id's. go down to the latest and highlight and enter. it goes to gmail.
Steven
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Steven Plummer
19. Please can someone invite me to GMAIL!!! I want one real BAD!!!
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by nsknayar
20. Well, I've NEVER had a problem with gmail. No outage or anything.. so I don't know what to say to you guys. -shrug-
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Michael
1. But how did the problem manifest itself? There seems
to be a constant grumbling about gmail not working,
but few details are issued, so it's hard to tell a pattern.
Is it the one where the "loading..." page appears and
never goes away? Is it the one where the login box
returns with "Sorry, service is currently not available.
Please try again later" in red? Are you getting
a 404 error? Or something else?
The message in red, at least when I got it on Friday did
indeed go away within twenty minutes, maybe less but I
didn't retry earlier. And it seems to be account related
in some way, since a secondary gmail account worked while
the first was indeed getting the red message; same setup
otherwise.
I've wondered if we are seeing overloading of their servers,
it still being in beta, but nobody is really giving much
info on when the problems occur.
And I wonder if the 404 error, and the "loading..." page
(it seems to be issued every time one logs in, but mostly
disappears too fast to be noticed) when it never goes away
are symptoms of something else. It may be an issue
at gmail, but are people reloading the page to make sure
the browser has the updated page? Are they logging in
immediately after to see if the problem goes away? Are
they clearing their browser cache just in case?
it is indeed hard to judge problems when symptoms are
not clearly conveyed. And I've yet to have a problem that
was as ongoing as some suggest, so I can't apply my problem
solving to see if I can fix the problem.
Michael
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Michael Black