Gmail, Google’s popular email service, crashed at approximately U.S. 11:45 AM ET/ 8:45 AM PT. At this time, we do not know why nor how this happened. Google has now said, “We experienced an issue with Gmail and some users experienced slow performance or errors. For everyone who was affected, we apologize – we know you count on Google to work for you, and we worked hard to restore normal operation for you. Although our engineering team is still fully engaged on investigation, we are confident we have established the root cause of the event and corrected it. Our current best estimate is that a significant subset of users’ Gmail web queries were affected for an aggregate of 18 minutes, from ~08:54 – ~09:00 and then from ~09:04 – ~09:16 Pacific Time.”
While the Google Apps Status Dashboard didn’t show any trouble with Gmail at the time, numerous users on Twitter, Google+, and other social networks reported the service was down. The handy Down for Everyone or Just for Me Web site also reported that Gmail was down.