Gmail was down on late Monday morning – though it appeared it might be working again in the early afternoon after an error message was posted. News reports suggest it is a global issue.

In one report from ZDNet it was called a “widespread outage.” Users were seeing a 502 error message. No explanation was immediately offered by Google. In addition, Google’s Chrome browser was crashing.

The outage led to many complaints posted on social media sites such as Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter. The number of complaints was comparatively high, given the popularity of Gmail.


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Google (News - Alert) Apps for business, government and education users were not affected by the outage. That was confirmed by a Google Apps website, called the Apps Status Dashboard.

There were some reports, too, that Google Calendar, Google Drive and Google Docs were not working properly.

One theory suggests an “authentification bug” affected Chrome Sync and Google’s authentification system.

The Washington Post also reported that Compuware’s (News - Alert) Outage Analyzer suggested an outage may have taken place in the Silicon Valley region in California.

Gmail has seen prior outages, like an outage in April 2012, when some 35 million customers were impacted. On Thursday, there was a Gmail outage – which lasted about two hours, The Washington Post added.

Some of those posting on Twitter showed their sense of humor in the situation.

For instance, Joy @Joydas wrote, “GMail is down? This is Devastating. How will the Nigerian Prince who wants to share his wealth with me contact me now?”

Or, Disalmanac @Disalmanac wrote, “UPDATE: Gmail is still down. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. YOU MAY NEED TO INTERACT WITH OTHER HUMANS. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

And The Dark Lord @Lord_Voldemort7 wrote, “Gmail is down. Clearly it decided to celebrate the impending Mayan apocalypse a few days early.” 

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