MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA (BNO NEWS) -- A large number of users of the popular webmail service Gmail were unable to access their accounts on Friday, Google acknowledged, but the issues were resolved in about an hour. Social networking website Google+ was also affected.

The problems began at around 2 p.m. EST (11 a.m. PST) when Gmail users started seeing a "temporary error" message. "We're sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable," the error message said. "We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes."

About 15 minutes later, Google confirmed on its Apps Status Dashboard that it was investigating "reports of an issue with Gmail," but provided no details about the cause of the problem. It later acknowledged that nearly all Google services had been experiencing problems, in particular Google+ and Blogger.

Approximately an hour after the outage began, the vast majority of Gmail users were able to access their accounts again, although some users experienced problems until about 3:15 p.m. EST (12:15 p.m. PST). A Google spokesperson declined to say how many users were affected by the outage, although users from all parts of the world were reporting problems.

"We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better," Google said in its final update, which is expected to be followed by a detailed incident report next week.

Friday's outage began just as members of Google's Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team were participating in an "Ask us Anything" event on Reddit.com. The team members provided no details about the latest outage, but discussed how Google generally responds to technical problems with its services.

"When an issue may be occurring, an automatic alert system will ring someone's pager - hopefully not mine!," said Carla G., a Google Site Reliability engineer who works on Storage infrastructure. "Nearly all of our problems are caused by changes to our systems - either human or automated - so the first step is playing the 'what is different game'."

Another team member, Dave O'Connor, who manages the Storage Site Reliability Engineering team in Dublin, was asked "how much freaking out" is done when a Google service goes down. "Very little freaking out actually," he said, "we have a well-oiled process for this that all services use."

O'Connor added: "We use thoroughly documented incident management procedures, so people understand their role explicitly and can act very quickly. We also exercise [these] processes regularly as part of our DiRT testing. Running regular service-specific drills is also a big part of making sure that once something goes wrong, we're straight on it."

Google's most serious recent outage occurred in December 2012 when Gmail went down for approximately 18 minutes, affecting up to 170 million users at the height of the outage. A smaller percentage of users also experienced difficulty using other Google services during the outage, that was caused by an issue with load balancing software.

Gmail has approximately 425 million active users worldwide, according to the most recent figure provided in June 2012.

(Copyright 2014 by BNO News B.V. All rights reserved. Info: [email protected].)

cut and paste error in the title perhaps?

cut and paste error in the title perhaps?

Corrected. Having problems with the feeds and hope to have corrected soon.

cut and paste error in the title perhaps?

Corrected. Having problems with the feeds and hope to have corrected soon.

You guys are just a bunch of screwups, just like Gmail.

The entire federal court system including web pages and filing system went down at 3:00. Been trying to file something all day. Pretty crazy!

It's the Universe's answer to the arrest of Justin Beiber.

Not surprising, I find Google Drive often hangs, and even Adwords sometimes doesn't work, come on GOogle if you want to monopolise the world make sure it's reliable. Man I hate them!

Not surprising, I find Google Drive often hangs, and even Adwords sometimes doesn't work, come on GOogle if you want to monopolise the world make sure it's reliable. Man I hate them!

Please. In the 10 years or so I have had my Gmail account I can only remember a couple of incidents where I could not access my E-mail. Google drive may have had a few more times than that where I had some problems getting into my folders, but it has been a very rare occurrence.

It's the Universe's answer to the arrest of Justin Beiber.

Looks like there won't be any relief for Google: http://mashable.com/2014/01/24/canada-pleads-keep-bieber/

......the cause........or reason being.......???

OMG, Google services down.

This could ruin lives.

It's the Universe's answer to the arrest of Justin Beiber.

Outta likes today Scott!

My other theory is that Google had a bet with NSA that NSA couldn't shut

down Google's servers....Google lost.

I hate to change subject, but this is kind if crazy. Took down entire Federal Court system nationwide.

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WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 (UPI) -- The U.S. federal court system was hacked Friday, with access to its public website blocked and lawyers and litigants unable to file legal documents online.

The federal court's public hub, uscourts.gov, most if not all federal court sites, and the federal court system's electronic filing system were affected, a spokesman for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts told Politico.com.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2014/01/24/US-federal-court-system-victim-of-cyberattack/UPI-22911390609590/#ixzz2rOYHmRjP

F430murci, you are not changing the topic. You are one of the only ones that is actually addressing the topic!