Apple's MobileMe mail, Google's Gmail go dark

Apple's MobileMe and Google's Gmail online e-mail services suffered hours-long outages Monday, leaving millions of users unable to access their accounts.

Google restored service within about two and a half hours, but it took Apple approximately seven hours to restore full access to its online mail service.

Apple users first reported trouble accessing the service's servers from their desktop mail clients around 2 p.m. Eastern, and in the next several hours, posted several hundred messages on the MobileMe support forum about the outage.

A notice on the service's main support page acknowledged the problem. "MobileMe members are intermittently unable to access MobileMe Mail using a desktop e-mail application, iPhone or iPod touch," said Apple. "Access to www.me.com/mail is unaffected. Service will be restored ASAP. We apologize for any inconvenience."

By 9 p.m. Eastern that notice had been replaced with an all-clear indicator.

Google's Gmail, meanwhile, went offline around 5 p.m. Eastern, and greeted users with a message reading in part, "We're sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors."

A little over two hours later, Google added a notice to its Gmail help page that attributed the outage to "the contacts system used by Gmail which is preventing Gmail from loading properly. We are starting to roll out a fix now and hope to have the problem resolved as quickly as possible."

Shortly after that, at about 7:30 p.m., Google declared the outage over. "Users who were temporarily affected by the 502 errors should now be able to access their account," read a message posted to the Gmail Help Discussion forum . "Thanks for your patience while we worked to resolve this issue for everyone."

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine