Google's Gmail suffers brief but widespread outage

Google has confirmed its free Gmail email service suffered a brief outage Friday, saying it has affected the United States as well as Europe and Canada. "We're investigating reports of an issue with Gmail. We will provide more information shortly," the company blogged. The outage occurred just before 2 p.m. EST, leaving millions of users unable to connect with Google's Gmail servers. Users attempting to access their Gmail accounts were greeted with a screen message saying, "We're sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes." Service was reported to have been restored for most Gmail users after about 20 minutes, although there were scattered problems with sending emails and problems with Google+. "We expect a resolution for all users in the near future," Google wrote. "Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change." Gmail has suffered outages before in 2009 and 2012.