Google is having a really bad day. The Mountain View-based search giant revealed that an outage affected its email service for approximately four hours. Google confirmed that users were not able to access their accounts. Gmail members received only a server error message when attempting to navigate to the official page of the service this morning. At this point in time Google Search was not affected, but the same is not valid for Google News. After the Gmail issue had been resolved, Google News also went out cold, as you can see from the screenshot included with this article.

“If you’ve tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we’re having some problems. Shortly after 10 9:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email,” revealed Acacio Cruz, Gmail Site Reliability Manager. “We’re working very hard to solve the problem and we’re really sorry for the inconvenience. Those users in the US and UK who have enabled Gmail offline through Gmail Labs should be able to access their inbox, although they won’t be able to send or receive emails.”

Google has subsequently confirmed that the Gmail outage was taken care of. "The problem is now resolved and users have had access restored. We know how important Gmail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologize for the inconvenience," the company stated. However, the Mountain View search giant failed to indicate what was the source of the problem.

At the same time, Google is saying nothing at all about the new Google News outage for now. Still, the two events could in fact have the same source, since the error “welcoming” visitors is similar. Users were able to “enjoy” a 502 server error instead of their news. “The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds,” reads the error message presented to end users. At the time of this article the Google News issue also appeared to have been resolved.