Today, Gmail has been was down for at least 96 minutes, showing the 502 Server Error :

If we consider the year has 365 days, each having 24 hours and Gmail is always online except this time, Gmail would be 99,98% on-line a year. Don’t worry google, you’re still on the 99.9 gap ;)

Just don’t repeat the August 2008 outage.

Question: Did this gmail downtime affect you?

PS: I don’t know when the service went down, but when I got here (19:40 + 0 GMT, 14:40 local time) the service was already unavailable.

UPDATE: Gmail is now on-line (21:16 GMT, 16:16^^ local time) and working as usual. Hopefully, I didn’t lost my mail ;).

UPDATE2: The gmail team has commented this issue.

UPDATE3: A more in depth post has been made. It explains why the gmail service went offline today and what they did to solve the problem.

The cause: a recent change in google routers was expected to redirect traffic to non overloaded servers. However, this caused a domino effect where all google routers were too overloaded and none of them could redirect gmail’s traffic to gmail servers.

The solution: google engineers brought “a LOT of additional request routers online” and the web interface was brought back to life.