 "Google, Facebook crash, get back up")
As reports across the web may have conveyed to those who did not experience it, several users worldwide complained of an issue with Gmail yesterday. As per details posted on Google’s App Status Dashboard, users complained of the Gmail delivering a slow performance, and then there were those others who couldn’t access Gmail because of some error. Shortly after, Google assured users that it is confident of having reached the root cause of the event and corrected it. “The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support,” Google wrote. Detailing upon the disruption, Google noted, “Our current best estimate is that a significant subset of users’ Gmail web queries were affected for an aggregate of 18 minutes, from ~08:54 - ~09:00 and then from ~09:04 - ~09:16 Pacific Time.”
Gmail, Facebook crashed yesterday briefly (Image credit: Getty Images)
Recently, several iOS and Android users complained of being unable to access Gmail. Users complained of an IMAP error occuring when they tried to access Gmail through their devices. According to reports, users received a ‘mail service imap.gmail.com is not responding’ error message when trying to access their accounts via IMAP.
At the time, Google stated in an email to AllThingsD that it is looking into the problem and is working on rolling out a fix. Google stated on its support page under the ‘Pop, IMAP and Sync’ tab, “We are aware of an issue where users are receiving an error that ‘‘imap.gmail.com is not responding’ when using IMAP on their computers, mobile devices, or tablets. We are currently working on resolving this issue”. It listed a couple of workarounds on the page too, which included trying to access Gmail through a web browser or by installing the Gmail application for the various devices while the problem is being sorted out..
Such widespread concern over a brief outage only goes on to show the massive popularity that some of Google’s services enjoy. This was also visible some months ago,when Google’s Gtalk service faced some issues, leading to users not being able to send messages to their contacts. Those using the service received a message statign that their chats haven’t been received. Tweets confirmed that the issue impacted the service’s users worldwide. Confused, users took to the popular microblogging site Twitter to vent their anger.
Facebook too got inaccessible for several of its users yesterday. Speaking to Business Insider, a Facebook spokesperson cleared, “Earlier today we made a change to our DNS infrastructure and that change resulted in some people being temporarily unable to reach the site. We detected and resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100 percent. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
Almost customary that it is, irate users took to Twitter with their reactions. One user tweeted, “mark zuckerberg said ‘facebook has so many serves it will not crash on a major scale.’ 10/12/12 facebook crashed on a major scale. Are you facing this problem?"
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