In what many seemed to take as a sign of the Internet apocalypse, Google’s email service went down for about 15 minutes this morning.
Those trying to access their online mail accounts were greeted with an error message. Sources reported outages not just in the U.S., but around the world, and for affiliated Google services like Google+.
Gmail users took to Twitter upon realizing the widespread nature of the outage. Google rival Yahoo tweeted an image of Gmail’s error page accompanied by a short message: “Gmail is temporarily unavailable.” Simultaneous to the outage, Google’s Reliability Engineering Team were on Reddit poised to answer “Ask Me Anything” questions.
As of 11:50am in California, service is spotty with some emails arriving late to their destinations and unable to carry attachments. Those hoping to chat today through the service might do better to rely on old-fashioned methods, like phone calls –– or perhaps the post office.