Gmail.com was down | Hacker News Reader

Gmail.com was down

mail.google.com

307 pointssethbannon300 comments

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A tweet by The Onion:

[In Focus] Google Shuts Down Gmail To Show Its Immense Power http://onion.com/UxyLs8

Gmail returns with G+ as your inbox.

ಠ_ಠ

And suddenly I'm on Reddit.

Onion's headlines can be really chilling - one example "Sudanese 14-Year-Old Has Midlife Crisis"

It's the best kind of satire. The kind that makes you laugh, then feel bad, then think critically about why you feel bad.

Note that the article/video is from last March. http://www.theonion.com/search/?q=google+gmail

That's about the right amount of time for reality to imitate parody.

Obligatory:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/fuck-everything-were-doing-... February 2004

http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2005-09-14/gillettes-fiv... September 2005

Wow, I saw the onion article but not the real story... that's crazy!

Obligatory:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/bush-our-long-national-nigh... - January 2001.

Damn. I'd forgotten about that one.

Is this affecting Chrome as well? Looks like it might be a bigger problem. It just crashed for three guys in our office within a few seconds of each other.

Edit: Nobody was using Gmail at any point.

Chrome is crashing over here too.

Same here.

My Chrome crashed a few minutes ago too, no Gmail open, but I do use an extension which checks it for me.

Edit: Looks like Chrome Sync is causing the crashes.

Chrome just crapped out for me too - I suspect it was polling the mothership or the like, but can't be sure

I've had Chrome crash on me twice now with GMail trying to open.

I can confirm Chrome crashed around the time of Gmail going down too.

It crashed for me too.

Same here. This is bad.

+1. Chrome crashed once for me, and it had an interesting error message. Something along the lines of "Wahhhh!!! Chrome crashed! Would you like to restart?"

+1, Chrome on Windows 7 64-bit. Started to crash every minute just around the time GMail was down. It stopped crashing after I rebooted my machine - I don't know if it is related or just a coincidence; just giving a data point.

+1 Win7 x64 too right when Gmail went out. And I thought it was an isolated WTF.

win8 x64 didn't go down for me at that time..

Wonder what the difference is? I don't sync among devices, but for the people that it did crash for do you sync among devices? Maybe that has something to do with it?

Happened to me as well.

Aye! 2 times in a row!

I think it is, I didn't even click on the link to gmail and my chrome crashed just a seconds ago. Looks like a sync issue maybe?

yes it seems to be - I disabled syncing in prefs and it seems to have stopped crashing.

Crashed Thread: 21 Chrome_SyncThread

was on the crash log.

I was able to reproduce the crash once by adding a bookmark, which probably forces a sync. Gmail came back up for me, though, so I'm not able to test this again.

Chrome just crashed over here as well.

Me too... going to disable any gmail/gtalk extension to see if it would be more stable

It crashed for me also. I wonder if it's because I have the offline gmail app for Chrome installed?

Also crashed for me.

Crashed for me too, twice.

EDIT: A colleague is seeing it too.

Both Chromium and mobile Chome are crashing for me. The Play Store is also unavailable to get a different browser.

Edit: I had Chrome Sync enabled on both. Seems more stable with syncing disabled.

Chrome is also crashing for me. It gives this error - Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library/ Runtime Error! / Program: C:\User... "This application has requested the runtime to terminate it in an unusual way" / "Please contact the application's support team for more information."

At times like these, it seems like having the ability to stick a user poll in a reply post like this would be a useful feature.

Try disabling account syncing in preferences. Its crashing in Crashed Thread: 21 Chrome_SyncThread It has not crashed for me after disabling that.

Crashing here with Gapps.

Yes. Chrome crashed for me too.

For what it's worth, I haven't had any crashes with either Chromium or Chrome on Ubuntu, but I'm not signed into my Google account via either.

It looks like mail.google.com is back though. I guess I opened them after the issue was fixed.

It may be region specific, it's still down for me.

I've noticed that Hacker News seems slower since gmail went down. I'd be interested to know how traffic responded. I'm guessing a lot of people default to HN if they hit a roadblock in their work. I know I do.

Yes, Chrome is crashing every two minutes or so for me as well. I think it has to do with Gmail being open in one tab while Gmail is down.

This is very bad.

Wha ... how ... why would browser performance be coupled to performance of one particular site? Firefox, Opera, even IE don't crash when they're offline and unable to connect to any site.

I don't think it's Gmail, I think it's the Sync service that is causing crashes.

Probably - no problems with Chrome here, no sync enabled, no GMail tabs open (using GMail in my standalone client only)

Yeah, I have sync enabled and using the official Gmail extension. I crashed several times not long ago.

Chromium crash on Arch Linux with this message: http://pastebin.com/f9JMsPzT

    terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::out_of_range'
      what():  bitset::set
    [1]    4934 abort (core dumped)  chromium

singing out of sync for now..

Edit: no crashes since I signed out of sync

Edit2: found a more complete stack trace by somebody else: https://gist.github.com/4251938

Bug Report: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=165171

chrome aborts left and right on win7 64, too.

Yeah, I get crashes all the time on Win 7 x64, but that might have something to do with having 100+ tabs open.

Ditto on Mountain Lion.

Chrome also starting crashing 30-or-so minutes ago, on a OS X 10.8.1, Chrome version 23.0.1271.95. I just had my Facebook account open in that window, but it continued crashing by itself after 5 minutes. GMail doesn't work , too, from neither FF nor Chrome, it does though from my iPhone (different web provider, I wonder if that counts).

Same here. Windows 8.

google-chrome on lubuntu crashed 3 times in a minute after going to gmail.

Yes Chromium without sync works fine for me too.

edit: Gmail works fine for me in Denmark, maybe it is only a regional outage?

my @gmail.com worked but my apps account on a different domain kept crashing. Both accessed from Denmark but with english as the language.

It was general for gtalk. I was chatting with my girlfriend in Paris and I'm in Montreal right know. Both gtalk stopped working and we finish the discussion on Skype.

Wow, I was setting up a new Arch box and decided to install Firefox instead of Chromium, almost there.

Interestingly the bug links to 163267, which is marked private (i.e. a security issue). I've had more downtime out of Google in the past few years than I ever did out of my Yahoo mailbox.

As soon as Yahoo shows me my inbox instead of an ad when I sign in, I'd consider going back. Until then, all the wasted time clicking away from the ad cancels any extra uptime. Luckily I've heard Marissa is actually pushing for this change :)

Well, outlook.com / live.com email is pretty nice nowadays. I'm tempted to forward my personal gmail stuff there for a while to see how it holds up.

Or you could go for a paid service without the ads. And we don't sell your data :)

  http://fastmail.fm

/bias

gmail sells your data?

Uses your data to target ads, using the term sells your data is a bit strong for what they do.

I tried outlook.com for a while after the launch, but I just can't go back to the folder system. Tag & archive is now a requirement for any future email service I'll use.

Marissa is "pushing for it"?

If she wanted it done, it'd already be done.

she just announced it :)

pay $20 ?

Options -> Mail Options -> Behavior -> Inbox -> Check "Show on Startup"

While you are on that page, enable SSL by default: Turn on SSL: Check "Make your Yahoo! Mail more secure with SSL"

Don't go back. Yahoo isn't good option. http://www.sami-lehtinen.net/blog/yahoo-mail-whats-wrong-wit... I installed my own mail server with webmail. Now I'm happy.

Chrome it is not crashing for me - on Ubuntu64 12.10 - Germany

Chat seems to be offline - mail works

Wow, a lot of people use Chromium over Chrome because of "omg botnet" - I wonder why Google downtime would cause vanilla Chromium to crash?

They do? I thought they just disliked undebuggable proprietary plugins.

I thought Chromium still had all the google tie-in issue. If I remember correctly what they pulled out was license encumbered features like font rendering. I know there were forks like iron that pull out the privacy features.

Google services use SPDY connections. I wonder if it has a bug in its implementation... not many sites use the protocl.

Chrome just crashed for me with gmail open as well. OS X 10.8.2. Chrome 23.0.1271.95.

No crash here, using Chromium ver 22.0.1190.0, compiled from source. However, GMail is extremely slow. Have been able to refresh (and access) it 3 times in the past 5 minutes.

Getting 500 errors from GMail now, still no crash

Same for me as well.

Wow. One web service goes down and you can't even use your browser.

Maybe this is a sign that they're too tightly integrated.

Or it could be, you know, a BUG

What he said. Some bugs are intrinsically unacceptable in the design of a computer program.

Not that everything I do is bugless, but separation of concerns isn't a swear word.

Of course, separation of concerns can lead to swear words if not well thought out.

By bug you mean design failure. A trivial external API should not be able to take down a desktop application.

Why do you assume this happens by design?

I assume it happens by lack of design.

Thanks for the nastiness, Google employee.

No. Since this is only happening to those that explicitly enable syncing with the web this is just a bug.

I don't have synching enabled and Chrome was repeatedly crashing for me earlier.

Crashed for me, too. I thought it was just because of a flash-heavy site, but maybe not.

I wonder if folks with Chromebooks(and running Chrome OS, not Ubuntu) are able to use them at all now? Can anyone chime in?

Tested on my Cr-48 and login works, seems limited to Gmail.

Web interface is down, but with a desktop client like Apple Mail it works to receive and send emails.

My Chrome is continually crashing here on a MacBook Pro Retina as well. Even just visiting unrelated sites like Android Market and others. I assume it is trying to sync my pages to my account, or pull down URL malware black lists or something, hitting the same error GMail is hitting, and crashing.

Mine crashed out of the blue as well, thought it was very strange.

My Chrome keeps crashing every minute or so; I gave up and am in Safari now.

My chrome is working fine. So is gmail. I'm in Bangladesh so maybe Asia is okay.

My chrome and gmail are both fine, U.S. Midwest, so its more complicated than that.

Mine are working too and I'm from Eastern Europe. It was probably a slight glitch of Google's servers or databases.

Yes, my Chrome has been crashing every ten minutes for the last half hour.

Yep, Chrome was crashing for me on iOS after about 30 seconds of use.

Crashing on my mac as well (OS X 10.8.2, Chrome 23.0.1271.95).

And I was wondering what was wrong. It crashed for me on 4 devices of different OSes.

Chrome Canary is stable, and Gmail loads from here in Italy.

Just to add some data: Did not crash for me. I am using sync and I have two gmail tabs open. However gmail has continued to work for me, only the chat has had some issues.

Using dev build from canada.

About the same for me too.

Gmail is up for me as well - but I was already signed in when it went down. Has anyone been able to sign in after it went down?

Yep Chrome crashed too during the outage for my colleagues and me.

chrome for linux 64 bit was crashing here too.. It was blowing up my RAM.. Du'no how

Gmail crashed, Chrome didn't, on two of my machines, Version 23.0.1271.95 m, and 23.0.1271.91 m

I was getting regular chrome crashes (same time as my co-worker) till I signed out of chrome so it wouldn't sync bookmarks, etc..

Probably not the time to rub people's face in it, but I host my own mail server because of crap like this.

Thread from the other day:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4886236

Yup. I'm entirely too reliant on Google products myself. My business not so much but personally I am pretty reliant on them.

I run my own mail server, but it's far from justifiable on a pure uptime basis. I don't have HA configured, so my mail (which serves <10 users on a box in colo) goes down for 2-3 minutes ~4-10 times per year when I reboot. Even worse, I don't really announce downtimes, but just randomly reboot it late at night if I've upgraded something important.

Sure, but you have 8-30 minutes of annual downtime, all planned by you:) Not too bad;)

That's best-case. I have backup-mx, but no real failover for imap or normal smtp (other than reading mailspool directly on the backup mx). I used to do a crazy flood-fill thing with 3 servers smtp forwarding mail and marking it, but doing mail HA correctly is kind of hard (and then keeping mailstore synced from imap in sync, too).

Yeah. We use glusterfs to handle the IMAP sync between multiple VMs for HA IMAP. SMTP MX clustering is pretty straightforward in comparison:)

How well would glusterfs work across the Internet? Doing local HA with some kind of SAN seems fine, but the thing I'm trying to solve is "entire datacenter goes down, make the user have no more pain than making a new imap connection". It seems like something that would really need to be handled inside IMAP (using some crazy backing store for mail, like a database) to be done well, but maybe filesystem level replication with maildir would be enough.

I wish there were some "best practices in systems administration" for different services, ranging from simple (just set up imap/dovecot) through complex (gmail-scale), per service.

There's been pretty good focus on how to do http, dns, and some database services, but not as much recently on smtp, imap, etc.

glusterfs would be fine for your situation. There's just some tuning you'll want to do to handle the WAN situation without performance hits.

Won't your own server also have downtime?

it does. When I want it to, not when I don't want it to.

What? If keeping uptime of a server was as easy as wishful thinking, we'd see a lot more of REAL 99.9% uptime.

The trick is to want it to be down when you notice that it's down.

I like it, for my next hosting company: We don't have downtime, just unscheduled maintenance.

That's called Enterprise Hosting and it comes at E10k/server/month excluding bandwidth. I wish I was joking.

"I meant to do that!"

  "One must require from each one the duty which each one can perform," the king
  went on. "Accepted authority rests first of all on reason. If you ordered your people
  to go and throw themselves into the sea, they would rise up in revolution. I have the
  right to require obedience because my orders are reasonable."

  "Then my sunset?" the little prince reminded him: for he never forgot a question once
  he had asked it.

  "You shall have your sunset. I shall command it. But, according to my science of 
  government, I shall wait until conditions are favorable."

  "When will that be?" inquired the little prince.

  "Hum! Hum!" replied the king; and before saying anything else he consulted a bulky
  almanac. "Hum! Hum! That will be about--about--that will be this evening about twenty
  minutes to eight. And you will see how well I am obeyed!"

http://www.angelfire.com/hi/littleprince/framechapter10.html

I think what he's trying to say is his downtime is planned - kernel upgrades, configuration changes, that sort of thing.

This is both somewhat true and somewhat not true. He's still vulnerable to failure of the hosting equipment and attacks from crackers. But, when he's the only admin, there's nobody else to fat-finger the server out of action, and if he only logs into the shell for service he will never fat-finger outside of planned service.

Hardware breakages and Zero-Day exploits usually tend to show up at most inconvenient times. I'd recommend everybody to not own an email server from a pure business perspective, unless you're a mail server admin anyways. There's so much time you can sink in it and still not achieve the level of security and uptime a quality email host will reach for much less money.

Now, there are arguments to run your own mailserver - you get to configure it exactly the way you want, you might see it as a hobby, ... But from a pure financial point of view it doesn't make sense.

I know. If you read my comment, you should notice I did not pretend attackers are not a threat.

Right, I somehow missed that part. Sorry about that :)

I know what he meant, but it's not like google is improvising with gmail. The site is already up by the way, it's been years since they have a more than 5 minute downtime. Also, you can never dream of having the same kind of redundancy as gmail will have nor the collective man hours spent in the project. I don't hate the idea of self hosting your mail, I just think it's ridiculous to say you'll have a better service than gmail when you have much better arguments like privacy, control and ownership.

Availability covers data loss and account cancellations out of the blue, which has happened to a friend of mine at least. this is one of the reasons I self host.

Also, the machine is in the same lan as me so connectivity is never a problem (unless the cat chews through the ethernet cables again).

So you have redundant internet connections, back-up power generators, a high availability cluster, etc? That seems like a lot of money just to host your own mail server.

- I've run my home server. They would crash randomly and usually when something else in the house like a water heater had broken.

- I've run pay servers in the cloud. Then they magically disappear because the expiration date on my credit card updated and the best way for GoDaddy to tell me was to wipe it and then send me an email.

- I've tried free servers. I got what I paid for.

Whatever problems GMail has (and it does have problems), it's not those. Absolutely everything else has left a taste of ashes in my mouth.

Pay for servers from someone other than GoDaddy--almost anyone else, really. Home servers are a really bad solution for anything remotely important, but shared hosting from the likes of Dreamhost, VPS from a company like Linode, or EC2 instances from Amazon are all fast, reliable, and cheap.

It was actually Dotster, not GoDaddy. I misspoke.

I don't mind paying, but what happens if there is a disruption in payment methods? I'm busy, and I'm also spread very thin on "things I can concentrate on." If my credit card expires without me noticing, I don't want all code and data on the VPS to vanish on me.

Your credit card expiring will presumably cause problems with more than one service; I recommend trying really hard to keep track of that date. (There must be a calendar you can put it in?) Most good hosts will disconnect you before wiping your drive, and will send you several emails (over the course of months) before that happens. But if whatever you're doing now works, even better!

Redundant connection - check 3g. Backup supply - check (fucking big aps). Ha cluster - yes i can fail to a vm on my desktop.

Meh, I've had my Gmail for a little over 6 years now. This is the first time I ever remember having this problem. (My Gmail is back up now, by the way.) I'll take this frequency over the effort it takes to maintain my own mail server any day.

What effort? After setup, it just works.

I doubt any self-hosted service is going to be more reliable than gmail.

Going on 11 years here with no real issues.

Gmail going down for a few hours each year doesn't count as 'real issues', IMHO..

Or maybe you have so few users, that when it does go down no one notices?

Monitoring is a beautiful thing.

So you're telling me that in 11 years, your server has never been down, even for a reboot, software update or hardware failure?

Going on 11 years here with no real issues.

Define "no real issues" cos I would define GMail going down for some users in parts of the world for a short period of time as "no real issue".

Servers and services are not the same thing. I always had more than one machine, each in different geographical areas. Shell scripts kept mail stores in sync, and stupid DNS tricks were used to direct users to servers that were alive. The overall costs were low too. I'd convince the ISP I was working for to let me colocate a pair of old desktops, and trade one with a friend I'd never met face to face.

To clarify my other statement, the biggest "issue" i've had is during a failure of the primary MX messages marked as read would sometimes revert back to being unread for a few minutes.

What do you use for webmail?

I host my own email as well and have been very happy with Roundcube - clean and fast, no bells and whistles.

fwiw, gmail's imap servers seem fine -- I'm still getting emails in sparrow.

I use gmail via IMAP on mutt and it still works fine, although the Web UI is giving 502 and other various errors. I guess it's just an issue with the front-end, not the mail server itself.

So your web mail interface is always down... I'm still sending and receiving Google Apps mail through IMAP, so we're currently at parity (except I've never had to manage my email server or deal with spam).

So your web mail interface is always down...

Why? There are Free webmail solution you can install on your own servers.

And they are all horrendous.

I switched from hosting my own server and using local mail providers to Gmail since they had never been able to provide sufficient reliability (uptime, spam filtering, mail delivery). I use, however, Gmail with my own domain name since I want to be able to change to another provider if necessary.

I think more appropriate link would be http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4821928. Gmail downtime is still negligible WRT maintaining your own mail server. But the problem is the downtime of ecosystem built around it.

That's not exactly a rational reason. You're really going to struggle to beat Google's uptime.

The reason I host my own mail because I want to own and control my data.

I've been on it for the past hour without a problem.

It must be server/account specific.

I think it's a pretty large outage. https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=gmail&src=typd

This literally went down about 45 seconds ago for me. Check again?

Got an email 5 minutes ago, just sent one to another gmail account a minute ago and just got a reply.

was down for like 30 seconds in my case. no issues with chrome whatsoever.

I have both a school account and my regular gmail account open continually; they still appear to be working fine.

I too never had a problem.

Ditto, although both of my accounts are on "Apps". Not had Chrome crash either, although I never use Syncing because I just don't trust Google to get it right..

Its almost as like google has distributed clusters all over the world and that these problems may only affect part of that cluster.

These "OMG GOOGLE IS DOWN" is the geek equivalant of "THE INTERNET IS DOWN" when Jane Officeworker can't get to msn.com.

I love google products (and I'm not worried about my email for a second), but their explanation is really bad:

"The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better."

It sounds like something an airline might say after bumping you to another flight!

http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=13...

EDIT: Thanks @mpeg for pointing out that this is a different outage. Still yucky copy though.

Wrong date

Today's outage: http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=13...

So far it only says "We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Mail. We will provide more information shortly."

http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status&ts=1...

Still no update

I really hate when the browser crash in the middle of a

Error 502 (Server Error)!!1

Is the 1 intentional?

Yes.

Yeah, it's a common internet meme. Often you will see the word 'one' in there as well. e.g. !!!11!!!one!!

Yes. It reflects a certain "intensity" at the keyboard which may involve the shift key finger spasming.

I wonder if this post has anything to do with it: http://www.elezea.com/2012/12/google-calendar-lost-data-secu...

I experienced a similar issue a couple of weeks ago when my synced chrome settings & bookmarks appeared on a co-worker's machine, a machine I've never signed in on. All his stuff was gone and replaced with an outdated version of mine...

There is now an post for this outage on the Google Apps Status Dashboard: https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=1...

"We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Mail. We will provide more information shortly."

I have a new yellow notice on top of Gmail.

"Novità! Le app Gmail per dispositivi mobili sono appena state aggiornate su Google Play e nell'App Store di Apple. Ignora"

Translated: News! The mobile Gmail apps have just been updated on Google Play and App Store.

I wonder if this is related...

Everything has downtime, folks. Everything.

Ok, I would like to take this opportunity to ask something about HN.

What if, say a month later Gmail.com goes down again. Then, how do I submit another post to HN? I mean wouldn't I be redirected to this one?

Submitting the link of a dead site has never really made any sense to me in the first place. If the company has a separate status page, post the most specific URL from that page. If not, perhaps an external checker like http://www.isup.me with a (manually entered) query string for the date would be appropriate.

To clarify what Cyranix said, it's possible to add a useless query string on the end of a URL in order to have HN fail to match a URL that's already been submitted. So say SocialMobileLocal.com goes down and someone submits a link:

  status.socialmobilelocal.com

When it goes down again a year later, you can submit:

  status.socialmobilelocal.com?foo=bar

Ah figured that myself. Now I can bring up old discussions again :)

Oh that's what happened. This is a pretty unexpected oversight from a company that tests their software so extensively to have browsers crash because an email service/sync service is down.

I'm having trouble too... the plain HTML version works though: http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html

Seems to work in Firefox, for anyone who needs to urgently access their Gmail. Still down in Chrome for me (Error 502), though it's not crashing the browser.

Works for me with both Opera and Chrome. Even with chat. Either they fixed it or it's an issue only affecting part of userbase.

edit: I'm in Europe.

Its fixed for me now.

Gmail is down and children are in the street weeping!

Oddly enough I was on Gmail and Chrome kept crashing. Did all the usual stuff, cleared everything, restarted etc. Turns out, for me at least, the only time it crashes is when I go to Gmail.com.

I'd really love to investigate and find out why these two related products behave this way but honestly I'm way too lazy.

No chrome crashs here (beta channel, sync enabled, germany, gmail tabs open), but Gmail was down too.

First updates from Google's App Status Dashboard: http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&ts=13...

My Chrome did not crash, yet I am logged in with Sync. Instead of keeping Gmail in a Chrome tab, I use Fluid app to make Gmail into a "desktop" app. Seems to still be up. Others can use the same workaround by opening Google apps in Firefox and Safari.

What is with the URL on this submission pointing to the URL any user of Gmail would use to access their account? Could the curators please change the submission URL to a source that shows reliable updated information?

Down in France : http://www.blog-nouvelles-technologies.fr/archives/21512/err...

Anonymous is claiming credit. http://www.chronicle.su/news/gmail-taken-down-by-anonymous/

Nope, they actually denied it => "Anonymous immediately denied responsibility for the attack on Gmail before finding out that no one knew who perpetrated the attack, thus making it a legitimately"

Been on Chrome for about 50 minutes, was on Gmail at the beginning of that. The only thing that was crashed was the chat on Gmail. Have not had a single problem with Chrome.

Gmail and all Google services are working for me using Chrome 24.0.1312.35 beta-m. I did have a 502 error for about 5 minutes, but it didn't crash the browser.

edit: typo

Gmail for Business works from my imap client (postbox) but not from the web site. So I guess their web interface is down - not the backend mail engine.

IMAP works for me also with Thunderbird.

My Android phone sends and receives just fine. It seems like a web related issue, and Chrome is likely just relying on communications with the server

I seem to still be able to send & receive mail via my sync on iPhone, and it seems Outlook Sync for Biz Apps is running fine. gmail.com only?

Feedburner has also been sporadically returning temporary errors over the last hour. Looks like it's a google infrastructure problem.

I can easily live with a few minutes of downtime for my mail, but they should fix Chrome and other platforms being dependant.

I wonder if it's linked to that calendar bug?

It's back up now. EDIT: went down again...

Chrome crashed 3-4 times in a row trying to access Gmail. This was on Windows, and I was logged into Google Sync.

Chrome just crashed on me for the first time. Gmail has been up and down a few times already the last 30 mins.

The chrome crashing can be stopped if you disable Synching. Means disconnect your Google Account from Chrome

I've been having luck with mutt. Looks like their POP / IMAP servers are running better than their webapp.

On the plus side, the little broken robot drawing on their error page is cute. It is no Octocat, but hey.

Haven't had a single problem, using both my Apps account and my Gmail account. Stockholm/Sweden, Firefox.

...and it's back up here now - must've only been down 10 minutes or so! (But Chrome just crashed again)

Absolutely no problems with any Google services (Drive, Mail, Calendar, Search) for me (Northwest UK).

Chrome crashed for the first time for me, when i tried refreshing the gmail.com page multiple times.

I noticed that none of my comments in my google document saved after I recovered from the crash.

I've just reloaded chrome twice as well as gmail and it's working fine here in Australia.

Both my apps and personal account are down.

It's working fine on Safari, albeit a little slowly. This seems to be Chrome specific.

My Chrome crashed as well while trying to load gmail. But in firefox gmail is working.

Google Plus is down for me now.

Chrome crashing due to failed sync problems with google servers and gmail is down.

The internet is awesome! This kind of collaborative trouble-shooting is epic!

Awesome, on my birthday...guess people were sending me too many bday emails!

lol, happy bday!

Aw, you too? Happy birthday! :-)

thanks HN-ers!

Play store is down for me too, crashed hard on my phone about 5 minutes ago

Gmail is working for me in FireFox. In Chrome, it is still crashing.

Chrome is crashing for me without even a gmail tab open. Curious...

Gmail is down for me too.

Strange, we got Youtube crashing chromes on all our Ubuntu machines

I couldn't get into Google Docs either. Must be something going on.

...and it's back up here now - must've been down 10 minutes or so!

a thread from earlier.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4898496

Speculation that it is happening to many users.

Google Now also appears to be having issues (at least for me).

It's back up for me now

Same problem here. All other Google services seem to be fine.

Even my chrome is crashing, switched to firefox a while ago.

Seems to be back up now. At least it's working for me.

Chrome has crashed twice for me in the last 2 mins...

It happens to the best of us :) is all I can think of

Seems to be up again for me (connecting from Europe).

Chrome Sync is crashing my Chrome every minute or so.

Few more days for 21 December, Mayan calendar. :P

... and it's back.

It's back up here

Chrome didn't crash, but gmail is down for me

Gmail work for me but chat isn't connecting.

Been working for me fine on Safari and IMAP

Working for me on Mac, but not in windows

Seems to be working fine from Chicago...

My Chrome crashed several times as well

Chrome is now trending on Twitter lol

I'm getting a 502 Bad Gateway error.

It's working intermittently for me.

Ops, something is broken - India

Chrome crashed for me as well.

crashes by itself with a 502 error on ubuntu. The chrome doesn't crash though

It seems to work fine now.

It's working for me now.

Working here on Chrome

Google is down again

Seems fine to me...

pop.gmail.com is not, and that's how I get my mail.

Me too, but it's working for me here.

I meant that it was not down.

Up and running now

I am disappointed.

went down for me. need to get work done. oh god.

Wow that's amazing. #1 news on HN already? This is pretty cool.

Working in FF....

And it's back up.

google drive also same issue

Works now!

Error 502

and... they're back.

and they're back down again.

FWIW I assumed gmail was down because of gchat going grey and saying it couldn't communicate. It turns out the mail is actually still working, so it's just gchat that's down.

aaaaand it's back )

time to switch to outlook.com

I suspect the chance of both services being down is under 0.0001%

Or alternatively wait 2 minutes for it to come back up. C'mon - you can't complain about Gmail's uptime record.

I was just going to say this. Been using Gmail daily since 2004 or so and I can count on one hand how many problems I've had. Stellar record, though as I said I am too dependent on it personally.

I'm sure Outlook.com will never, ever have an outage.

zombie day is upon us.

GMail is working fine here (France) both my personal email and my professional email. No Chrome crashing. Linux Debian 64 bit.

I use different browsers (in incognito mode), from different user accounts, to surf the web / do online banking / browser hacker news etc.

No plugins, no "sync" (heck, I don't even know what that "synch" for Chrome is), no issues.

I have similar configuration. Fedora 64Bit, chromium and gmail work fine. No plugins for chromium, no sync, only a gmail tab is open. I use firefox for everything else. This bug seems interesting!

Hey guise I'm in Chrome right now, and it's working just (&$(&#(*&# )#

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