Gmail bounces back after disruption that affected web interface

If you saw a 502 error on Gmail this morning, then you are not alone. The Gmail service was disrupted today morning, according to a status on the Google Apps Dashboard. But, we can now confirm that the service is back up.

The service which went down for nearly an hour is slowly coming back to life, with users now reporting on Twitter about the resumption. The disruption came to light when many Twitter users complained of the service being down and G-Chat also went down . Interestingly, the downtime was only experienced in the web interface of Gmail, with both the mail and chat service working perfectly on our mobile phones.

Google Apps Dashboard showing the disruption in Gmail

Several tweets came from users in India, which points to a local problem rather than a global outage. Users in the Middle East have also reported facing downtime when trying to access their email or other Google services.

During the disruption, we were unable to sign in to our Google account and entering the username and password returned us to the landing page without a successful login.

A quick look at downrightnow.com didn’t reveal anything amiss at the time, but now the website has updated its status on Gmail to reflect that the service is up. A look at Gmail’s graph on downrightnow.com also reveals a service disruption, which started at around 11 am.

The graph from downrightnow.com showing the hours when Gmail was down

One reason for the disruption could be the fact that Google India’s Gurgaon HQ was hit by a power cut earlier today as revealed by James Crabtree, the Head of Financial Times’ Mumbai bureau on Twitter.

We have reached out to Google India for an official response on the outage. Look out for an update on the situation soon.