Gmail blackout: Google apologizes

Google Inc. apologized on Tuesday for an outage that hit business and consumer users of its popular e-mail service, Gmail, which left millions of people worldwide without e-mail for several hours. "We know how important Gmail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologize for the inconvenience," Google said in a statement. According to comScore, more than 113 million people use Google mail worldwide, behind Hotmail with 283 million users and Yahoo with 274 million e-mail users. Google said its engineers were still investigating the "root cause" of the problem. Gmail service had crashed a couple of times last year also, but had operated uninterrupted since it was bolstered with features that include people being able to draft and read messages offline. Apart from free service Google offers professional service to business around the world and more than a million businesses use Google's professional suite of applications, including e-mail.