August 11, 2008

Gmail's Temporary Error

Gmail is currently down for many users and it shows a 502 error message:

"We're sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won't be able to use your account while these errors last, but don't worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue. Please try accessing your account again in a few minutes."


Some Gmail accounts can still be accessed using other interfaces: basic HTML, mobile version or IMAP, but you can't receive or send messages.

The problem seems to be widespread, since many people are reporting it on Twitter and Gmail's group. "Gmail Temporary Error (502). Last time I saw something like that from Gmail was 2004," says José. "All my Gmail accounts are down. 502 Temporary Error. for nearly an hour already," complains Jonas. "bitful is all grrr because Gmail throws a 502 (temporary error) and wonders if the cloud can be trusted after all."

Gmail Guide says that "the Gmail team is currently aware of a subset of users being affected by the 502 error on login. (...) Engineers have pinpointed the issue causing the 502 errors and it looks as if users should start to regain normal functioning of their account."

Update: After more than an hour, Gmail is back, but the outage is in Google Hot Trends.


TechCrunch has more information from Google:

"Since about 2 p.m. Pacific Time today, many Gmail users have been unable to access their email. We are very sorry for this interruption in service. The issue is being caused by a temporary outage in the contacts system used by Gmail which is preventing Gmail from loading properly. We are starting to roll out a fix now and hope to have the problem resolved as quickly as possible. Even though you may not be able to get to your inbox right now, your mail is safe, including new incoming messages."

12 comments:

  1. Hey, whaddya want from beta software? [Ducks and covers and scurries away :o) ]

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  2. I was still able to get to it by IMAP and the text-based web interface, so it wasn't too bad for me. It must have sucked for people who didn't know about the alternate ways of getting to it. :(

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  3. The GMail 502 error is unfortunately becoming the norm, not the exception. Just look at the GMail announcements page at Google Groups:
    http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Help-Announcements-and-Alerts-en/topics

    The 502 error has been a regular occurrence. As you can see from that URL, it's every month and now almost every week. I've been affected by ALL those 502 outages mentioned. Extremely annoying! It took more than 24 hours to fix every time.

    The problem is that I really like GMail because of it's features but this proves that the service tends to be unreliable. How can you use it as your primary email if it goes down every month?

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  4. That Gmail failure shows how dependent we are of cloud services - people went berserk!

    As this article http://tinyurl.com/google-disappointment about their top-10 disappointment shows, the fact that Gmail hasn't gone out of beta is ridiculous.

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  5. heck I didn't even know it did go down.

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  6. Looks ominous at the moment too...

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  7. This is happening again as I type:
    http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/news/news.phtml/22504/23528/google-gmail-email-service-down.phtml

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  8. Btw, the time on here is wrong. Its 4:17 pm right now. Gmail has been down for 17 mins now.

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