Lots of people around the world who rely on Gmail were disrupted during their waking and working hours. If you've tried to access your Gmail account on Tuesday, you were probably aware that there were some problems.The problem was resolved after 2.5 hours, and users have had access restored, according to a Google update
Google has apologised for the two and a half hour Gmail outage on Tuesday morning, and admitted that the cause was down to datacentre maintenance.
"Lots of people around the world who rely on Gmail were disrupted during their waking and working hours, and we are very sorry. We did everything we could to restore access as soon as possible, and the issue is now resolved," said Gmail site reliability manager Acacio Cruz in a blog post.
Google had been testing new code designed to keep data geographically closer to its owner, which brought about disruption when maintenance in one datacentre caused another facility to be overloaded. This had a cascade effect, according to Google, and it took the company an hour to get it back under control.
The routine maintenance event meant that this caused another Google Data center in Europe to become overloaded and this caused a chain reaction like dominos. Cruz went on to explain that the software bugs have been squashed and that the new codes are progressively being pushed.
Also, you should now see the effects of the new geolocation-capabilities of Gmail based on your IP address.