Gmail, Gfail

Tuesday's Gmail outage left users seeing only a "502 server error" page when trying to login to the Web-based system. Word of the problem spread quickly and didn't take long to hit the tech blogs, where it was quickly dubbed as Some unofficial reports indicated the outage lasted as long as four hours. Google says it was only about two-and-a-half.

"We know that for many of you this disrupted your working day. We're really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could," Gmail Site Reliability Manager Acacio Cruz stated in the .

"Obviously we're never happy when outages occur, but we would like to stress that this is an unusual occurrence," he added.

Gmail Outages Over Time