Gmail Outage: Users Report Being Unable to Send Emails & Attach Files


Gmail Outage: Users Report Being Unable to Send Emails & Attach Files

An increasing number of users are reporting that Google’s email client – Gmail, has gone down! Gmail is not letting users send emails or attach files for the past one hour. It was also brought to light that this problem has been observed not just among people in India, but also in Australia, Japan and other parts of the globe. Business Insider showed that Google Drive was also unable to share files or upload and download them. Hence, Google and their engineering team is investigating the issue while it has also confirmed the outage on its status page.

This kind of outage has happened earlier too, in fact, this is the second outage in two months with widespread issues with Gmail. In July, users reported not being able to log into their Gmail accounts. Gmail noted this issue and fixed it, but never gave an explanation as to why the problem actually occurred in the first place. But today, Google has confirmed that there are intermittent issues with Gmail and will be providing more details shortly to its users.

Back in July, 2020, multiple users in India have reported a similar kind of outage wherein they were not able to log into their Gmail accounts. Downdetector showed that users started to flag off problems at around 4:30pm and reports continued to flurry in peaking at 5.38pm. Most of these complaints of Gmail being down in India were reported by users on Airtel’s network. Some users reported not being able to log into other Google services that were linked to their Gmail accounts such as Play Store, YouTube, Google Cloud, Google Meet and Google Drive.

Gmail is a free email service developed by Google. Users can access Gmail on the web and using third-party programs that synchronize email content through POP or IMAP protocols. Gmail started as a limited beta release on April 1, 2004 and ended its testing phase on July 7, 2009.

At launch, Gmail had an initial storage capacity offer of one gigabyte per user, a significantly higher amount than competitors offered at the time. Today, the service comes with 15 gigabytes of storage. Users can receive emails up to 50 megabytes in size, including attachments, while they can send emails up to 25 megabytes. In order to send larger files, users can insert files from Google Drive into the message. Gmail has a search-oriented interface and a ‘conversation view’ similar to an Internet forum. The service is notable among website developers for its early adoption of Ajax.