Google's free web-based e-mail service has been hit by more
technical problems, cutting some users off from their Gmail account
for thesecond time in a month.
Google has suffered a string of technical difficulties this year
as it steps up its campaign to
attract businesses to its subscription-based web services for
e-mail and other applications.
The company announced yesterday that an unspecified problem was
preventing a "small subset of users" from accessing their Gmail
accounts.
About two-and-a-half hours later, the internet firm said the
problem had been resolved and service had been restored to all
Gmail users.
"We apologise for the inconvenience and thank you for your
patience and continued support," Google said in a message on its
App Status
Dashboard.
The latest Gmail outage comes just over three weeks after
millions of Gmail users were cut off from the service for more than
an hour-and-a-half.
Google blamed that disruption of service on server maintenance
and said it was taking steps to ensure similar disruptions would
not happen again.
These latest outages follow similar
disruptions caused by technical problems in May and
February.