This is the message:

"Sorry, there seems to be a problem. The service you're looking for is temporarily unavailable. We're working hard to restore your access as soon as possible. Please try again in a few hours. Thanks for your patience."

0900 CDT edit: works for me now.

Getting the same message. However, this is happening to some of my logins only. Same with e-mails, some of them are working fine and some of them are timing out or asking for passwords. For a second I thought someone hacked my e-mail. :>

Me too, I was really scared. Now I know is Google's problem I am breading again.

> Me too, I was really scared. Now I know is Google's problem I am breading again.

I hate it when Google get in the way of my sandwich making ;-)

Given the naming scheme of Android releases, it seems like Google would let you eat cake instead.

Same.. I was the only person in the company unable to access emails. Was scared I was about to be called into a boardroom ;-)

That error message seems to just be Google's default 500 error message page; even when it is an API request that fails, even if the API is specified to return errors as some kind of JSON or XML, you get that HTML page in response. (I know this as Google's OpenID+OAuth pipeline has been failing occassionally for the last month, something I've been trying to get them to fix on the Google Federated Login API mailing list.)

Google Apps status page: http://www.google.com/appsstatus

The Register reports that GMail went down exactly a year ago:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/18/google_gmail_outage/

Huffington Post reports that Gmail also went offline on April 29th of 2010.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/29/gmail-down-check-gm...

Google reports that Gmail also went offline on April 24th of 2009.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/current-gmail-outage....

(Sadly, the partial Gmail outage of 2011 seemed to be February 27th, or this would be an epic pattern of "don't trust Gmail during the end of April" ;P.)

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Messaging-and-Collaboration/Google-...

I'm a Google Apps reseller and thought, oh no, I should call all my clients and let them know about this outage before they call me! Where can I get a full customer list.. the admin panel.. oh.

Your only copy of your customers, is in a third party reseller control panel?

Of course not. Just the fastest way to get them! Fortunately, Confluence, Autotask, and my memory are all still intact!

"and my memory"

When all else fails, this is the true old school solution. :-)

The phone calls from my clients have started to come in already...!

There are API endpoints for that. Not sure if they're affected.

Well, their email services are still working, because I got a message about our trial ending today and that we need to start paying. I hope this comes up before we get automatically cut off..

Nearly 30 minutes since it started and the status page is it's customary blank screen.

http://imgur.com/OLyGf0O

Almost as bad as AWS at getting notices up.

Now it is showing Service disruption for Admin control panel / API

http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status&ts=1...

Odd, "Admin control panel/API" is marked as disrupted for me.

Yeah it is now, only took 30 minutes :-)

The outage is affecting IMAP/POP/HTTP for email plus Gchat, the admin control panel/API is probably the least impact.

Getting IMAP rejections, and Google Docs doesn't seem to be working: http://cl.ly/image/3W2e0X1O1i0o

Crazy – my IMAP client (Apple Mail) has no problem until it tries to send via SMTP… when it chokes.

Also, no working gmail for all my accounts except my @gmail.com address – at least fail consistently, you Googlers. Blech!

smtp.googlemail.com also failing

(edit: intermittently)

Oddly enough, gmail itself works on my Google Apps domain. But accessing my account page does not work. As well, I can't log into Gchat using one of the generated passwords (says password rejected). I'm guessing this is the same reason IMAP is failing for others.

Already discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5563949

Service disruption

http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=13...

At least Google Reader still works :-)

I don't get why apps and all sorts of other google sites go down a lot, but search never has in my experience. Why is that? Is search just simpler? Does it fail in non-obvious ways? Enormous redundancy/fail-over on search?

Search is (mostly) stateless. They can copy the search database to hundreds of DCs around the world, and each can operate independently - so if one of them has a problem, it's not likely to affect the others (unless it's bad data, but that's why you shouldn't deploy index updates to all DCs simultaneously). There's some personalization, sure, but you can just fall back to non-personalized search if that breaks.

Things like gmail, on the other hand, are inherently stateful. When you log into gmail, you have to eventually connect to one system that maintains your mailbox. Sure, there might be replication - but the replicas are all talking to each other. It's surprisingly easy to have a cascade failure in a system like this, where one of the replicas going down triggers (directly or indirectly) all the others failing as well. Or you can have some bad data that gets replicated out, and then proceeds to confuse everything that's looking at it - unlike search, you have to replicate that data immediately, and don't get to enjoy the benefits of a staged deployment.

This also explains why not all users were affected - I'd guess that their system is divided into some number of shards, and users are assigned to a particular shard. That 0.07% of users affected probably represents a single unhealthy shard.

Contributing the vast majority of revenue for the company has something to do with it.

I'm wondering if this is related to the new update they did to the admin control panel.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/make-g...

There is a massively linked Boston bomber Google Docs spreadsheet making the rounds -- the last time a viral Google doc saw that sort of exposure, the service went down.

I'm getting IMAP logins rejected as well.

Since you always worry you are going crazy when a high-uptime site is down: mine too

FWIW: I was able to log in by going to www.gmail.com and logging in suing myusername@mydomain.com as the username.

Tried this -- didn't work for me unfortunately.

I'm also getting errors when trying to retrieve Gmail messages in IOS Mail. "Wrong username or password", but it works in a browser.

It's intermittent for me. I first noticed trouble when the Android gmail app said it couldn't connect for one of my accounts. I cannot login to my apps domain control panel right now, but I can access its email via both IMAP and the web interface. However, another account on that same domain cannot access via IMAP.

This explains the SMTP problems I was having, I was worried someone had hacked my account or something...

It's interesting that I kind find news for this on google itself, but Hacker News already has two posts.

The dashboard hasn't caught up. Admin Control Panel is one thing, but GMail/Apps has a huge impact!

As I said in the other google apps thread on hackernews..

I thought I'd give them a call to find out whats going on, however to call them I need my support/admin pin - which is only accessible from the admin portal and without it they won't answer the phone. Nice.

Appears Groups is down also.

Still getting errors sending transactional messages to users on gmail

Apr 17 10:23:30 postfix/smtp: connect to gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[2607:f8b0:4002:c02::1a]:25: Network is unreachable

I did wonder about this. My phone said my username or password was wrong for my email, got a bit worried, so I tried with their webmail and it worked there.

Was having problems with play developers console yesterday, suddenly it was a 404. Seems like they're planning something in my opinion.

That explains why I can't get my email =).

This is happening for gmail for some accounts, but mine seem to be running. Seems the outage is per user account.

I got a 500 when I try to access our Drive too. It's been an hour now. Using the business google services.

I also can't authorize an app to have access to a Gmail account. Google's auth page presents an error.

Same here. Intermittent though. I'm like 2 for 5.

Faaack. I thought I was just having a local connection issue. Same problem here.

Down here. Additionally, my iCal won't sync with goocal.

digitalpbk$ nslookup smtp.google.com Server: 8.8.8.8 Address: 8.8.8.8#53

server can't find smtp.google.com: NXDOMAIN

SMTP servers are down for me. Anyone else?

NXDOMAIN wouldn't be server down, that's no DNS record. Still won't work, but different (much bigger) issue.

I'm pretty sure the 'bigger' issue here is that it's smtp.gmail.com - smtp.google.com is, I believe, always down on account of not existing. :P

Works fine for me:

    > dig +short @8.8.8.8 smtp.gmail.com
    gmail-smtp-msa.l.google.com.
    74.125.136.108
    74.125.136.109

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/nsl...

Or: smtp.googlemail.com

try `nslookup -querytype=MX google.com`

I cannot access my email from Sparrow app too.

Webmaster tools also down with auth failure.

Google Drive is down for me on Apps too.

Yeah.. my pop mail stopped working too

The provision api is still fine doh.

SAML logons are failing, too.

It's back.

not only that, seems like pop3 is also facing issues ..

Now its working..

And We're up.

down for me too