Google fixes Gmail after brief outage around the world

SAN FRANCISCO — Google Inc suffered a service outage on Friday that briefly took down Gmail, the email service used by hundreds of millions of people and many businesses across the globe.

Google, which first acknowledged the outage at 11:12 a.m. Pacific Time (1412 ET), said a little over an hour later that the problem with Gmail had been resolved.

As of late Friday, the company did not offer an explanation for the outage, which affected users in at least India, Britain and the United States and prompted a stream of complaints on Twitter from users in many more countries.

“We’re investigating reports of an issue with Gmail. We will provide more information shortly,” the company said on its “App Status” dashboard online, which tracks the state of various Google services.

Google Docs, the cloud-based productivity application that competes against Microsoft Corp’s Office suite, also suffered a service disruption, according to the Google dashboard. Other Google properties, the social network Google Plus, and YouTube, appeared to load slowly as well.

Gmail, which includes calendar and chat features, has soared in popularity over the past decade to become one of Google’s most successful product offerings. With more than 420 million users, it has begun to make small inroads against Microsoft Exchange in the battle to provide email services for corporate customers as well as individual consumers.

Yahoo Inc, which also runs a rival Internet mail service, seized the moment to post a screenshot of the Gmail error page to Twitter. Yahoo later apologized for the barb and deleted the tweet.

Google users attempting to sign on saw a “temporary error” message and a brief note: “We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes.”

source: interaksyon.com

Microsoft relaunches Hotmail as social-friendly Outlook

Microsoft Corp unveiled a revamped, Facebook-friendly version of its free, online email service on Tuesday in an attempt to reverse market share losses to Google Inc’s fast-growing Gmail.

The world’s largest software company is renaming its Hotmail service Outlook, giving it a sharp new look, social network links, and new features for handling the tide of junk and mass mail that swamps many users.

Hotmail was still the world’s largest online mail service as of June, according to the latest comScore figures available, with 324 million users, or about 36 percent of the global market.

But it is losing customers to Google’s Gmail, the fastest-growing rival, which now has about 31 percent of the market. Yahoo Mail is static with about 32 percent. (For a graphic showing webmail market share, click on link.reuters.com/ded79s)

In a bid to recapture growth, Microsoft is renaming the service Outlook, a name familiar to most corporate workers who use Microsoft’s Office email application, and sprucing up the whole experience. Hotmail users will be prompted to switch over to the new service over the next few months.

Hotmail, launched in 1996, was one of the first online email services, but it has not been updated by Microsoft for eight years.

“A lot has changed in the last eight years, and we think it’s time for a fresh look at email,” Chris Jones, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Windows Live, said in a blog post.

The new look is clean and uncluttered, featuring lots of white space, reminiscent of Google’s recent makeover of Gmail. Relatively unobtrusive advertisements appear in a column to the right of the screen when looking at folders. They do not appear when a message is open.

Users can link up with their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ accounts, to see the latest updates from friends and contacts. Online chat is available via Facebook.

Newsletters, offers, daily deals and social updates make up over 80 percent of a typical inbox, according to Microsoft’s own research. To help combat that overflow, the new service automatically detects mass messages and puts them in separate folders. Users can customize the process to sort mail any way they want to.

The new mail service also allows easy use of Microsoft’s Internet-based products, such as SkyDrive for storing documents, Office Web Apps for working away from a PC, and will eventually have Skype video chat built in.

Users can access the service at www.outlook.com. Microsoft said the service is currently a “preview,” meaning more features will likely be added before the final version is fully launched.

source: interaksyon.com