No, it's not just you. Gmail crashed and let down 30 million users last night.
Google admits that 10 per cent of its users, that is, 30 million people, could not access their emails. The outage affected not just private users, but businesses who rely on Gmail to power their company's remote email system.
Gmail users first noticed the error around close of business, 17 April. The outage continued into the night, and some users were reporting no service this morning.
Gmail owned up the error at 5:42pm on 17 April, writing on the company's apps status dashboard:
"We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Mail. We will provide more information shortly."
By 6:46pm, just over an hour later, the company apologised with a statement that read:
"The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. .
":[Update 6:45 PM Pacific] We've determined that this issue affected less than 10% of the Google Mail users who attempted to access their accounts during the affected timeframe. While we have resolved this issue with Google Mail, it's possible that some users may experience message delays because affected accounts weren't available to receive messages. The messages will be successfully delivered after account access is restored."
The episode could be straight out of an episode of Gmail man, seen below. In this anti-Gmail ad campaign by Microsoft for their Office 365 suite, Gmail man is seen doing what Gmail does best, reading keywords from your email and proposing unsuitable ads based around them.
The tongue-in-cheek anti-Google campaign may not be the most well-acted viral video around, but it sure hits Google where it hurts. Another episode spoke of how Google apps seem to suddenly disappear.