Gmail battles through another outage

Google was forced to deal with another outage on its Gmail webmail service Thursday.

The company first gave notice of the outage at roughly 7:30 AM US Pacific time (15:30 GMT) and said that the outage affected "a small subset" of its user base. Within an hour the company had begun to restore access to users, though for some access to contacts and chat features remained offline.

By 10:00 AM the issue had been completely resolved, according to Google.

This is the second time this month in which the Gmail service has been rendered inaccessible. When the service went down 1 September, the company issued an apology to users and said that the outage was due to complications from router maintenance.

The September outages join several previous instances this year in which the Gmail service has crashed. The outages may also reinforce sentiment amongst administrators that the service is not yet ready for enterprise use.