The outage on Google's popular webmail service happened early this morning. Google posted an alert on its help pages saying that they were working on the problem. According to Google representatives, the outage only affected a "small subset" of its users, although tech analyst Robin Wauters of TechCrunch.com said she "wasn't buying" that story.
Hackers took advantage of the outage by building a Google group called "Gmail down" that purported to have information about the problem but instead just displayed adult images and links.
Although the group is user-generated, it did manage to find its way to the top of Google's search results for "Gmail down" very quickly. Google representatives responded to the snafu on their official blog.
"If you’ve tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we’re having some problems. Shortly after 9:30 a.m. GMT, our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email," the post read. "We’re working very hard to solve the problem and we’re really sorry for the inconvenience."
TechCrunch's Wauters noted that Google's blog said they noticed the outage hours after users started reporting it on other blogs, such as Twitter.
This morning's outage comes within weeks of another widespread foul-up that caused Google's search engine to label the entire Internet as malware.
Users can monitor Google's progress in fixing the problem at the Google Help Center.