Google fixes problem that delayed messages for several days
Some Gmail users suffered through the weekend without receiving any e-mail because of a glitch that apparently delayed message delivery for a few days.
A Gmail help forum thread titled “I haven’t received a single email since last night!” was started on Friday, with five pages of comments being filled up by users who were not receiving email.
Chrome OS: 10 things you can (and can’t) do with the Google PC
Although a lack of e-mail, in some cases, may be an indication of unpopularity, in this instance it does seem to be due to a technical problem on Google’s end.
“I usually get a bunch of emails in just a couple of hours, but I haven’t received a single email since last night,” the user who started the thread wrote. “I know for a fact people have sent me emails – I sent one myself from an aol account…and nothing is coming through. What is going on and how do I fix it???”
Google’s Apps Status Dashboard indicates that there have been “no issues” with Gmail over the past week, but a Google employee did acknowledge the problem within the comment thread.
The Google employee told users today (Monday) that “I know this hasn’t been easy and I can understand your frustration. I just wanted to let you know that we’re still working on this. I do have an update that the messages should be coming in slowly, including the messages over the weekend. Unless the messages were bounced back to the senders, the messages should be coming in over time.”
Users are now reporting that e-mail is being received, including ones sent on Friday, but expressed concern that some messages would be lost.
“A couple trickled in from today. does that mean 4 days worth of email is lost in cyberspace?” one user asked. “It’s been an extremely frustrating weekend, to say the least!” another wrote.
For what it’s worth, Gmail isn’t my primary webmail service, and I wasn’t aware of the problem until today. Therefore, I didn’t test it out over the weekend, but I was able to successfully send e-mail to my little-used Gmail account just now.
I would guess that this was limited to a small percentage of the Gmail population, simply because it doesn’t seem to have gotten that much attention. But it’s not the first technical glitch to hit Google users in December. Google users have also complained about a calendar problem that caused events to show up on the wrong day of the week.
While the calendar problem seems to have been resolved, it took Google more than a week to sort it out. I am also aware of one other possible problem with the Calendar service, based on the fact that an organization I had a conference call with today missed the meeting, and blamed it on Google Calendar failing to distinguish between Eastern and Pacific time.
Gmail in general seems to have gotten more reliable over the past year or so, but the events of the past couple weeks raise some questions about Google’s online services. Any Google users experience problems recently? Feel free to comment in the form below.
UPDATE: I received a response from Google’s public relations department, which says: “As of this am, this issue has been resolved. The reason why it was not addressed on the Dashboard is because of the very small number of affected users.”
Follow Jon Brodkin on Twitter.
