Partly cloudy: Google's Gmail goes down; outage chronicled on Twitter

TheNextWeb reports that Dutch news service NU.nl had to remove ads served by Google-owned Doubleclick because they weren't loading.

We could only verify the downtime for Canada which gives us a 502 server error and Google.us which seems to work for some but not for others:

Strangely enough adding ‘www’ in front of Google.ca does give us a Google front page which would suggest a simple DNS problem.

Gmail and Google Chat appear to be unavailable; Docs and Analytics seem to be fine.

UPDATE 4:05PM EST: According to Google's own Apps Status Dashboard, Google Mail appears to be down, reporting a "service outage." Yesterday, a service disruption was recorded.

UPDATE 4:09PM EST: TechCrunch notes that Google had a brief outage this morning and sent an alert to confirm the problem:

September 1, 2009 8:18:00 AM PDT Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.

TC's Nik Cubrilovic notes that both the Google front-end and its back-end IMAP and POP servers are down.

UPDATE 4:12PM EST: Google says they're aware of the problem:

We're aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 4:53:00 PM UTC-4 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

UTC-4 is the Eastern Time zone in the U.S.

UPDATE 4:20PM EST: Remember when this happened in May?

UPDATE 4:22PM EST: Mobile users say e-mail's working fine for them.

UPDATE 4:23PM EST: Google's posted another update:

Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 5:16:00 PM UTC-4 with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience. Users can access their email via IMAP or POP. You can find instructions for how to do this here.

They also attempt to calm the Twitter storm with a tweet of their own. Some users are rethinking their dismissal of Yahoo or AOL mail.

UPDATE 4:32PM EST: Google's updated again:

Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users within the next 1.2 hours. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.

UPDATE 4:34PM EST: Shanghai, China and Cagliari, Italy checkpoints are appearing unavailable when pinged, but no packets are reported lost:

UPDATE 4:38PM EST: Shanghai appears to be fine now, but Cagliari's still out of the loop. Auckland, New Zealand and Antwerp, Belgium momentarily reported 10% packet loss.

UPDATE 4:48PM EST: More on Antwerp and Auckland, the latter of which persists:

Not sure if this is related. Readers?

UPDATE 4:52PM EST: Twitter's feeling the heat of the Gmail outage, itself a bit slow from hyperattention.

Some are feeling the wrath of an inaccessible cloud:

UPDATE 4:57PM EST: Gmail reiterates IMAP access instructions on Twitter. They also posted about it on the official Gmail blog, naturally. They're handling this much better than the previous outage.

UPDATE 5:03PM EST: Gmail has now been down an hour for some users.

UPDATE 5:35PM EST: Gmail has come back to life. At 5:22, @donreisinger posted on Twitter, "Phew. My Gmail is back. Good thing." At 5:28, @randallb posted, "And we're back." Then the rest of the Twitter chorus joined in.