It seems Google’s Gmail service has been offline, slow and/or reporting 502 errors for several hours in many different countries around the world.

There has been a veritable torrent of people talking about it on Twitter.

The BBC has already picked up the story and the Gmail support page is giving status updates.

From the BBC article:

Professional users of Google mail are covered by a service level agreement that promises to be 99.9% operational in any calendar month.

I guess that just shows how much SLAs are really worth. But Gmail does still maintain that it is a ‘Beta’ product.  This just proves it.

I’m glad that our University hasn’t made the move to Google Apps yet, unlike others.

Here’s another article from VentureBeat.

And one from Father Roderick with some useful tips on how to cope.

Personally, I experienced two 502 errors and then it came good… slowly and still sans-chat.