New From Google Labs: Seriously Offline Gmail

Well, this brings new meaning to Offline Gmail…

Google’s Gmail email service suffered a major worldwide outage early this morning, leaving millions of users without access to the popular service for over three hours. “If you’ve tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we’re having some problems,” Google said in a message posted to its official blog. “Shortly after 10 9:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email. We’re working very hard to solve the problem and we’re really sorry for the inconvenience.”

Three or so hours later, the service began working again. The company offered no explanation for the cause of the outage, which is among the longest Gmail has suffered to date. Another high-profile embarrassment for Google (GOOG), which last month was forced to issue an apology for mistakenly flagging the entire Internet as malware.