Gmail goes down leaving millions stranded

Gmail was down a few hours ago, leaving millions of users stranded from checking their emails. The problem had to do with proxy servers unable to communicate with Gmail’s servers causing a 502 error.

Google has said minutes ago that the service has now been fixed, saying: “The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. On Monday, 10 December 2012, we experienced an issue with Gmail and some users experienced slow performance or errors. For everyone who was affected, we apologize – we know you count on Google to work for you, and we worked hard to restore normal operation for you. Although our engineering team is still fully engaged on investigation, we are confident we have established the root cause of the event and corrected it. Our current best estimate is that a significant subset of users’ Gmail web queries were affected for an aggregate of 18 minutes, from ~08:54 – ~09:00 and then from ~09:04 – ~09:16 Pacific Time.”