14 DAY TRIAL // As we reported last week, a 502 error made Gmail inaccessible to its users for about 15 hours. Yesterday, the error occurred again. And, once more, the reassuring message from Gmail's help center proved to be a bit too optimistic. "These errors generally resolve themselves within a few minutes, so please wait a bit before trying to log in again. Please note that while Gmail is inaccessible, your messages and personal information are safe."
People were facing the same problem as before and, since it was the second time in one week that it happened, Google realized that this was a good moment to apologize for the inconvenience. "We don't usually post about problems like this on our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted. [...] Again, we're sorry." posted Todd Jackson, Gmail Product Manager on Gmail's official blog.
The cause behind users' impossibility to access their email accounts was an outage in the contacts system that prevented the email client from loading. The team at Google assured that email content and contacts lists were all safe during the breakdown. Although the problem has been solved in the meantime, people could still face a delay in the delivery of messages.
While the first time when the error was encountered the company claimed that only a "small subset" of users was affected, this time, it reached a global scale. As proved by the thousands of comments on Twitter, Gmail's role in people's lives is greater than anyone could have ever predicted.
Some of the users, although concerned about the impossibility to check job emails or send important messages, took to Twitter to describe the situation with a certain dose of humor. "'Struggling with down Gmail' support group, starts now. 'Hello, my name is Gavin and I'm Gmail addicted. I keep checking my email every min.'" one of the many Gmail fans said.