Google's Gmail service crashed Friday afternoon, leaving millions of users helpless. Other service like Google+ and Hangouts were also affected.
Users were unable to login to their accounts or were welcomed by a page telling them that their accounts were temporarily unavailable and to try again in a few minutes. The outage lasted more than an hour had a lot of users venting their frustration on twitter.
Ironically, Google's site reliability team was answering questions on a Reddit AMA at the time of the outage. while they did not respond to queries about the outage, a team member did respond when asked if the team was "freaking" out.
"Very little freaking out, actually," the Google employee wrote. "We have a well-oiled process for this that all services use -- we use thoroughly documented incident management procedures, so people understand their role explicitly and can act very quickly."
The Gmail outage also came the day after Google announced it will pay hackers altogether around $3 million to find security exploits in its Chrome browser in the Pwnium 4 competition in March.
Google's published service advisories listed the problem as resolved at 3:23 p.m. EST.
Yahoo also took to twitter to remind its followers that "Gmail is temporarily unavailable." Not many people seemed perplexed by the issues with Google+, which has been struggling to compete with Facebook.
[USAToday] [Mashable] [Chromium Blog] [Google]
