Gmail outage affects millions worldwide; Google acknowledges delays, says fixing

Millions of users around the world suffered outages on their Gmail accounts on Saturday.

The service experienced widespread issues for several hours from approximately 3 p.m. Israel time. Users were able to send mail as usual, but it was not being received by the intended recipients.

In some cases, when emails reached the Gmail server, rather than accepting the email and delivering it to the user’s inbox, the sending service received the message: “Temporary System Problem. Try again later.”

“We are experiencing an issue with Gmail. Users may experience delays in email delivery. Our engineering team continues to investigate the issue,” Google acknowledged.

In a subsequent update, it said, the failure had been corrected, and it was now dealing with the backlog of undelivered mail.

“Mitigation is currently underway and email delivery is no longer failing, however, the Google Engineering team is now working through the backlog of undelivered messages and expect all messages to be delivered in the next few hours.”