Millions lose Gmail in Google blunder

12 April 2012

Millions of email users were knocked offline last night after human error caused a blackout of Google's Gmail service.

The two-hour disruption was caused by an error during upgrades to the company's web servers.

Google was forced to apologised after the miscalculation which affected the majority of the company's 150 miilion users.

Today's disruption led tens of millions of Gmail users to get an "Unable to reach Gmail" error message as their computers tried repeatedly to reconnect to the service.

The company said it had taken some of Gmail's servers offline for routine maintenance, and underestimated the load that would place on other computers responsible for directing traffic to the appropriate Gmail servers.

Google said it was alerted to the failures within seconds. It said it has added capacity and made other changes to prevent similar incidents in the future.

A separate outage on Monday had wiped out e-mail to a "small subset" of users.

The company's last major technical problem in May with millions of people unable to use its main search page as well as Gmail and Google News after too much traffic was routed through computers in Asia.

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