Outage at Gmail renders thousands of accounts inaccessible to users

Many Gmail users could not access their accounts due to an outage that hit Gmail services today.

According to web reports, the email service crashed for an extended period of time today in many parts of the world with users having to wait several minutes only to be served with a request by Google to retry after 30 seconds.

Users were asked to try again with the prompt: "The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds" each time they tried to log in.

Apologising for the inconvenience, the internet search giant said on the Google Apps Status Dashboard that if users get a 502 error message it meant the account was temporarily not accessible.

The outage comes as Google just concluded its advertising campaign that sought to persuade companies to switch from Microsoft applications like Outlook and Word to Google's online Apps for Your Domain, which has Gmail as its centerpiece.

In view of the severity of the problem Google in a post on Google Apps Status Dashboard, Google has said, ''We're aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail.''

Google however did not give a time frame as to how long it would take to fix the problem. ''We will provide an update by 11 May 2010 11:45:00 a.m detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.''