On Friday (at 7.15 pm Irish time) Google-owned email service Gmail experienced an outage that affected users across the globe. Gmail is one of the world’s most popular email providers with hundreds of millions of users worldwide.

For some users, Gmail’s service appeared to resume shortly after the incident but many people reported having problems for a couple of hours with accessing, sending, or receiving email.

It is still unclear what caused the outage and Google is still investigating. Yahoo (Gmails rival company) posted a screenshot of the issue on Twitter showing the Gmail error page.

Google issued a statement on its “App Status” dashboard online which tracks the status of different Google Applications.

Users who had problems signing on were able to see a “temporary error” message and a brief note: “We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes.”

At this time Youtube comments did not work and both Youtube and Google+ (Google’s own social media network) appeared to run slower than usual.

By 8:23 pm, Google said, it had restored service. “The problem with Gmail should be resolved,” the company said. “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.”

Update on the Gmail Outage:

VP of Engineering Ben Traynor said an internal software bug was at the root of the problem, you can read what Ben had to say here:

http://googleblog.blogspot.ie/2014/01/todays-outage-for-several-google.html