Google's free web-based e-mail service has been hit by more technical problems, cutting some users off from their Gmail account for the second 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.
