Has something finally beaten the Google giant?
Google's Gmail servers around the world crashed this morning, leaving millions without access to their Gmail accounts.
Web-based Gmail accounts stopped working around 5:25 a.m., affecting users in the United States and abroad, according to news accounts from around the world. Google did not say how many people had been affected, but Twitter users and bloggers from India to the United Kingdom and even as far as Australia have posted updates throughout the morning saying their Gmail accounts were down.
Google did not confirm what had caused the outage, but the Internet juggernaut said it was working to correct the problem, which appeared to be limited to its web-based application.
"A number of users are having difficulty accessing Gmail," the company said in a statement.
"We are working to resolve the problem. We know how important Gmail is to users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologise for the inconvenience," Google said.
More than 113 million people worldwide use the Gmail service, according to tracking agency ComScore.
U.S. & World
The Gmail servers crashed last August for several hours, but the problem was corrected within the day. Google apologized then, citing a temporary outage in the contacts system that upended their servers.
