Gmail in widespread outage, also caused Chrome browser crashes

Summary: Gmail suffered a widespread outage earlier today. It's not yet clear what caused the problems, but in many cases it also caused Chrome browsers to crash worldwide.

Gmail was hit with an outage at around 12 midday ET.

Gmail is down... and it's up again, in what may be the strangest, shortest outage the company's cloud-based email service has suffered in memory.

Gmail suffered from a widespread outage earlier today. First reported from social media services -- such as Facebook and Twitter -- many were unable to access their Google-based email accounts for minutes.

At 12:30 p.m. ET, Google said that it was "investigating reports of an issue with Google Mail," and said it would provide more information shortly. It did not offer anything else, except marking it has a "service disruption," rather than a "service outage."

At 1:10 p.m. ET, Google gave the all-clear and said that the "problem with Google Mail should be resolved." Google also noted a problem with Google Drive, which has also been fixed.

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I was checking into a Saigon hotel last night at about 10pm local and needed to access a booking voucher stored in my Gmail, kept getting the "502 Error" message while the desk clerk hovered over me nattering "Need voucher, need voucher"....REALLY annoying!!

Had to leave a cash deposit to get my room: fortunately was able to get Gmail in the am and straighten it all out.

Guess I'll look for a back up service when back in BKK.

I got a message on my phone saying that it didn't support the encryption Gmail was using. But I was able to download all my mail in Outlook 2010 this afternoon.

I now duplicate all hotel vouchers and etickets on both GMail and a dedicated Outlook.com account.

You have a facility in Gmail/settings/forwarding to have an automatic forwarding of all incoming email to a backup account eg yahoo or hotmail.

You have a facility in Gmail/settings/forwarding to have an automatic forwarding of all incoming email to a backup account eg yahoo or hotmail.

I'd never paid attention to that feature, thanks for pointing it out: done already.