Google experienced service disruptions that affected some of its applications, including its popular Gmail app and its Google Drive service, for almost two hours.
According to Google's apps status webpage, the Gmail outage affected less than .007 percent of users and was resolved at about 11:00 A.M. ET. However, the outage was big enough to cause Gmail to be a trending topic in the U.S. on Twitter.
Affected Google Drive users received the following message when trying to access the service:
"Google Drive encountered an error. If reloading the page doesn't help, please report the error. We're sorry, a server error occurred. Please wait a bit and try reloading your spreadsheet. To learn more about Google Drive, please visit our help center."
The disruptions began at about 9:00 A.M. ET and continued into the late morning.
While the issue may now be resolved, here's a way to check your Gmail next time it goes down.
If you can't access your Gmail, try going to iGoogle.com and logging in with their Gmail password. If your Gmail account isn't in one of the columns, try clicking the "Add Gadget" icon in the upper-right hand corner of the iGoogle webpage. Search for "Gmail" and click "add it now" to your iGoogle page. Then return to your iGoogle page and see if it appears.
