Gmail Suffers 15-Hour Partial Fail

Gmail is recovering from a fairly long-lasting partial fail.

Many users were locked out of their accounts for almost 15 full hours Wednesday night into early Thursday morning. InfoWorld first picked up on the story, finding the discussion forums full of frustrated users — many of them, evidently, paying Google Apps subscribers who rely on Gmail for their corporate or educational mail access.

“For a company with your reputation, I’m absolutely shocked at the apparent absence of customer service,” one user wrote.

To Google’s credit, an advisor did post regular updates to that forum. The company also set up a second, read-only announcement board with occasional updates. The first posting came at 1:06 p.m. Wednesday:

“The Gmail Team is currently aware of a subset of users being affected by the 502 error on login. Our engineers are actively investigating the issue, and we will provide updates as soon as we have them. We appreciate your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

After two more postings indicating progress, the final message came at 3:43 a.m. Thursday:

“Users who were temporarily affected by this problem should now be able to access their account. Thanks for your patience while we worked to resolve this issue.”

Comments in the forums indicate a similar issue arose a couple of weeks ago, in mid-July.

It’s not clear how many users were affected in either instance.