Gmail blackout creates strange headache for California man

Google Inc suffered a major embarrassment on Friday when not only were Gmail and its other popular services hit by a glitch, but an individual living in California (a Hotmail user) saw his inbox flooded with thousands of messages on the same day.

Users who searched 'Gmail' were led to a results page with a link that said 'Email'. Clicking that link created a new email with the address of one David S Peck of Fresno - dsp559@hotmail.com - already filled in.

''I've been getting thousands of no-subject, blank emails - 500 of them come every hour, I can't stop them,'' Peck told a journal on Friday.

The deluge got so extreme that Peck began missing important messages because he couldn't delete the unwanted emails fast enough. Most were blank, but some contained messages like ''who is this?'' or ''why are you sending me these emails?''

Google apologised for the outage later on Friday, but said Peck's problem was not related to this. Experts however believe that it was likely to be a result of many users searching "Gmail" to figure out why they couldn't access their messages.

The internet giant said that the problems have been fixed. The outage affected around 42 million users for close to an hour on 24 January. There were complaints from Europe, Canada, the United States and other regions elsewhere for disruption in services.

''Whether the effect was brief or lasted the better part of an hour, please accept our apologies-we strive to make all of Google's services available and fast for you, all the time, and we missed the mark today,'' a Google spokesperson said. He added that the company was putting more checks and monitors in place to ensure that ''this kind of problem doesn't happen again".

The outage however gave an opportunity to its rival Yahoo to mock to Google with the tweet "Gmail is temporarily unavailable". It was accompanied by image of Google's "Temporary Error (500)" page. This however was removed later.