Gmail, the email service developed by the Mountain View search engine that is being used by hundreds of millions of people all over the world has suffered an outage at the end of the week (on the 8th of May to be more precise). The downside is that this is not the first time that Gmail goes down, it has happened before (details here and here); the upside is that this time the outage lasted for a short period of time (roughly 20 minutes).

Google has issued the following statement: “A number of our users had difficulty accessing Gmail this morning. The problem was immediately investigated, and service was restored within 20 minutes. We know how important Gmail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We encourage anyone having technical difficulty to visit the Gmail Discussion Group or the Apps Status Dashboard."

It must be said that at the current time Gmail works just fine. The issue has been remedied by the Google team, but investigations still need to be made so as to find out what caused this latest outage. When the aforementioned cause of the outage is identified, it will be made public, said Google.

In related news, it seems that Gmail isn’t the only one to have problems; Chrome has issues as well. The development team behind the Google developed browser will not be able to provide a dev update this week, for one simple reason: no bandwidth.

Program Manager Mark Larson explains: “We were not able to issue a Dev channel release this week. Our test team did a great job in qualifying two Stable updates and a Beta update this week, and we just didn't have the bandwidth to push a Dev channel release. We'll get an update out early next week. Stay tuned for some exciting new features we hope to land in the Dev channel.”