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Gmail Goes Down Again Today, Twitter Blames It On The Mayans

By Lisa Eadicicco: Subscribe to Lisa's RSS feed | December 10, 2012 6:26 PM GMT

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(Photo: Courtesy/Wikipedia.org)<br>After blocking Google’s Gmail service for a week, the Iranian government has decided to remove the digital barrier after a barrage of complaints, some of which came from Iran’s own parliament.

(Photo: Courtesy/Wikipedia.org)
After blocking Google’s Gmail service for a week, the Iranian government has decided to remove the digital barrier after a barrage of complaints, some of which came from Iran’s own parliament. 

Around noon on Monday, several users began experiencing Gmail outages. The problem began to affect some subscribers just before noon, and some were greeted with a “504 Error” prompt upon trying to access the service. The issue appeared to fixed by about 12:10 pm EST for some, but the email service continued to act slow and sluggish for some users.

Gmail for mobile appeared to be working during the outage, but some reports also said that the tablet/smartphone version of the e-mail service was down as well.

By 12:50 pm EST, service appeared to be fully restored.

According to Google’s service dashboard, the last reported stint of unusual activity dates back to four days ago on Dec. 6. However, that didn’t stop some Twitter users from cracking jokes:

“Gmail is down. I can tell by the looting, and the fires in the street,” user Ed Yong tweeted on Monday.

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“Gmail is down. Welcome to Obama’s second term everybody,” BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski posted to Twitter.

“Gmail is down. Did Google hire Scott Forstall?” tweeted Brian X. Chen.

Others among the social media community blamed it on the Mayans, an ancient people whose calendar ends in 2012, sparking the myth that the world will come to an end this month.

“Well, Gmail is down. So this is either a warning shot from the Mayans or they were off a week on calculations,” user Dave Levy tweeted.

“Gmail is down and keeps crashing Chrome. THE MAYANS WERE RIGHT, PEOPLE #apocalypse #gmail,” tweeted Nick Thorpe.

“GMAIL IS DOWN THE MAYANSSS KNEWWWWW” user iiano posted to Twitter.

The last time Gmail experienced such a widespread outage was back in April when users were greeted with the following message:

“We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes. If the issues persists, please visit the Gmail Help Center.”

Just like today’s issue, Google was quick to address these problems in April as well. If another issue persists, we’ll update this article accordingly.