New Delhi: Google suffered a service outage on January 24 night that briefly took down Gmail, Google+ and Google apps, leaving millions of users – including business users relying on Google Apps for Business – unable to communicate. Google's official blog for Gmail also returned a 503 error.
Google+ was also down which meant that users can't comment and existing comments aren't loading on YouTube. In addition, Hangouts were not working on both the web and mobile, which have emerged as a primary method of communication for remote teams. Google Docs, the cloud-based productivity application that competes against Microsoft Corp's Office suite, also suffered a service disruption, according to the Google dashboard.
Google, which first acknowledged the outage at 11:12am Pacific Time (1912 GMT), said a little over an hour later that the problem with Gmail had been resolved.
With a large number of users tweeting about the outage the downtime Gmail actually became a trending topic on Twitter, indicating the sheer magnitude of the crash.
The last time Gmail went down was September 24, 2013.
