The Internet giant announced at 10.29am (1429 GMT) that an unspecified problem was preventing a “small subset of users” from accessing their Gmail accounts.<\/p>\n
About an hour later, the Internet giant said service had been restored for some users and at 12.58pm (1658 GMT) it said the problem had been resolved.<\/p>\n
“We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support,” Google said in a message on its App Status Dashboard, a site which monitors the performance of its online services.<\/p>\n
The disruption came just over three weeks after an outage which left millions of users without Gmail for more than an hour and a half.<\/p>\n
Google blamed server maintenance for the September 1 Gmail outage and apologized for the disruption, which it called a “Big Deal.”<\/p>\n
Google also suffered technical problems in May, leaving millions of people unable to use popular services such as its main search page, as well as Gmail and Google News.<\/p>\n
Google also experienced a breakdown of Gmail, which has tens of millions of users, in February which lasted a few hours.<\/p>\n
The failures, while rare, are seen by some industry analysts as a setback to the Mountain View, California-based Google’s efforts to promote Gmail and other Web-based services to businesses.<\/p>\n