Gmail users experienced service disruption on the morning of December 16 after there were reports of error messages and high latency. Google admitted that the problem is affecting a significant subset of users of Gmail.
“Affected users received a bounce notification with the error “The email account that you tried to reach does not exist” after sending an email to addresses ending in @gmail.com,” Google said in a service detail page. Also Read - How to unsend or recall emails on Gmail?
However, Google resolved the issue at around 6:51 PM ET. “The problem with Gmail has been resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support,” the company added.
Downdetector.com that shows real-time outage reports with services, revealed that 75 percent users faced issues with receive messages, while 23 percent had problems with log-in. Only 1 percent users faced issues with the website.
ProtonMail, which is a secure email service, said in a tweet that Gmail is permanently bouncing emails sent to Gmail users. “The problem is on Google’s side, and is impacting all email traffic (not specific to ProtonMail),” the tweet read.
Separately, several users also took to Twitter to report issues with the Google’s email service. “Seeing all my work emails returned as undeliverable
#gmaildown #googledown,” a Twitter user wrote. “gmail is down so i haven’t gotten any emails in two hours and…is this what heaven is like,” wrote another user.
This is not the first time Google’s services have faced issues. Recently Gmail. YouTube as well as Google Drive faced outage of “approximately 45 minutes” on December 14 due to “an internal storage quota issue”. The outage affected Google users across the world as they were not able to access emails or Youtube.
Though Google said the issue affected a significant subset of users of Gmail, it did not reveal an exact number. Notably, Gmail and YouTube together have over 3.5 billion global users.
