Gmail service takes a break

Google's popular Gmail service, went down this morning, preventing millions of users from accessing their email, justifying the service's beta tag that remains several years after it was first introduced.

The outage occurred at approximately 9:30am GMT and appears to be worldwide. Some users have reported that Google Docs has gone down too, although this does not appear to be the case for everyone.

"A number of users are having difficulties accessing Gmail. We're working to resolve the problem". Google told IT PRO in a statement.

"We know how important Gmail is to our users so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologies for the inconvenience. We encourage anyone having technical difficulties to visit the Gmail help centre at mail.google.com/support, where we are posting status updates on the situation."

IT PRO contacted Google to clarify the situation and was provided with the statement over the phone. "I'll have to read it to you if that's OK -I can't email you, obviously," a spokeswoman said.

Not surprisingly, many Gmail users were alerted to the issue via Twitter, and the range of comments made it clear that the issue was worldwide.

However, not everyone was upset at the outage. "Enjoying the fact Gmail is down so I can get some work done and not be held hostage to my inbox," commented one user. Meanwhile a Google Premier Apps user pondered how long the service would have to be down to break Google's SLA. This was an issue raised in our recent review of the Google Premier Apps service.

At the time of writing. the Gmail service had been resumed, but only for some users.

Last month human error at Google caused every single website that appeared on its search engine to be flagged as malware.