Google denies Gmail users an early start to the weekend after problems accessing service

If you struggled to get into your Gmail this morning, it wasn't just you. Unhappy users from Europe all the way to South Africa reported a significant outage. The issues kicked off at around 8.30 UTC and left some users flummoxed, with many taking to the anger echo chamber that is Twitter. Gmail email outage, had issues …

[Alumoi]

Serves them right for not using only Google approved browser to access Google's email. I'll get my coat.

[chivo243]

Message to our users

It seems that Google has some issues with the following services:

- Google Mail

- Google Calendar

- Google Chat

- Google Meet

That is all, but isn't it enough?

[nematoad]

Bastards, the lot of them.

Well users might be gnashing their teeth in frustration but spare a thought for Google.

Think of all the data they could have been slurping from all those emails and messages.

Money doesn't grow on trees you know and they have a duty to turn all that data into bonuses for the C suite.

[MrMerrymaker]

Oh no!

How will I access all the American medical care spam that, just being images, bypasses their spam filters??

[MrMerrymaker]

Re: Oh no!

Which spammer gave this a thumbs down?

You do know you can't block messages that contain only images, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Oh no!

The downvote wasn't from me, but I've disabled spam filtering on my gmail account. Too many false positives.

There's nothing worse than an email system that blackholes mail silently with neither side being made aware.

THAT sort of thing is what has made email unreliable.

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Re: Oh no!

Google can't refuse mail by network or headers because their AI system would immediately recognize the strong correlation between Google and spam. My mail logs say Alphabet Gmail, Amazon SES, and Oracle Responsys are pretty much all of the spam attempting to arrive.

[Pascal Monett]

"a relief for all three users"

Methinks there may bit a wee bit more, especially since I noticed, the last time I logged into my Gmail account, I was logged in to Hangouts.

It would appear that Google, in its vast goodness, has decided that, once you log into Hangouts, you can no longer log out.

I guess the top brass were tired of seeing shrinking usage, so they told the trolls in the basement to do something about that.

[Amentheist]

Alright fess up

Who's gone and dun a deployment on a Friday

[Peter Galbavy]

Ah! And I thought my automated SMTP sending from home devices was getting IP blocked today - well, it is, but not for the reason I thought!

[Alan J. Wylie]

Loss of service is bad enough, but a spurious "critical security alert" is ridiculous

First I knew was an e-mail:

"Subject: Critical security alert"

"Someone just used your password to try to sign in to your account. Google blocked them, but you should check what happened."

Why can't Google show the IP address that the attempt came from? It would have saved me a lot of worry.

Then I checked my logs: lots of these messages starting at 08:31 GMT, triggered by fetchmail

System error during SSL_connect(): Connection reset by peer

pop.gmail.com: SSL connection failed.

Connection errors for this poll:#012name 0: connection to pop.gmail.com:pop3s [2a00:1450:400c:c0b::6c/995] failed: Connection refused

[Warm Braw]

Re: Loss of service is bad enough, but a spurious "critical security alert" is ridiculous

Curiously, I got no alerts at all - which is very unusual as my browser configuration means I usually get one every time I go anywhere near their services.

However, my IMAP client (Evolution) was reporting "network not reachable" for a network that clearly was - at least in routing terms - so presumably something weird going on with a load balancer.

[Tom 7]

Bastards!

I just assumed Thunderbird had updated and Google were being utter wankers and blacklisting it again so I checked on my phone and no-one loved me so I looked through all the usual Mozilla shit and then accidentally opened up Thunderbird again and and it was all happy working again.

It did however make me wonder how you can use a phone for work - I have around three hundred mail filters and associated folder heirarchy which I'd need a fucking big phone to implement.

[Jean Le PHARMACIEN]

Never noticed...

GMail address is for spam as of years ago

Gcal reduced to deep-freeze as of Jan this year and now have my own calendering server (works with Davx and Android)

In fact, Google have pissed me off so much with "give your date of birth to comply with the law" notifications that I've pissed off their primary apps from use...

[DS999]

Is it just me

Or are cloud outages from the major providers happening more and more often, and affecting larger and larger geographic areas?

[William Higinbotham]

They called contracted support

Their outside help support, I believe is IBM. Go figure.