Is this affecting Chrome as well? Looks like it might be a bigger problem. It just crashed for three guys in our office within a few seconds of each other.
Chrome also starting crashing 30-or-so minutes ago, on a OS X 10.8.1, Chrome version 23.0.1271.95. I just had my Facebook account open in that window, but it continued crashing by itself after 5 minutes. GMail doesn't work , too, from neither FF nor Chrome, it does though from my iPhone (different web provider, I wonder if that counts).
I thought Chromium still had all the google tie-in issue. If I remember correctly what they pulled out was license encumbered features like font rendering. I know there were forks like iron that pull out the privacy features.
It was general for gtalk.
I was chatting with my girlfriend in Paris and I'm in Montreal right know.
Both gtalk stopped working and we finish the discussion on Skype.
Interestingly the bug links to 163267, which is marked private (i.e. a security issue). I've had more downtime out of Google in the past few years than I ever did out of my Yahoo mailbox.
As soon as Yahoo shows me my inbox instead of an ad when I sign in, I'd consider going back. Until then, all the wasted time clicking away from the ad cancels any extra uptime. Luckily I've heard Marissa is actually pushing for this change :)
I tried outlook.com for a while after the launch, but I just can't go back to the folder system. Tag & archive is now a requirement for any future email service I'll use.
+1, Chrome on Windows 7 64-bit. Started to crash every minute just around the time GMail was down. It stopped crashing after I rebooted my machine - I don't know if it is related or just a coincidence; just giving a data point.
+1. Chrome crashed once for me, and it had an interesting error message. Something along the lines of "Wahhhh!!! Chrome crashed! Would you like to restart?"
Wonder what the difference is? I don't sync among devices, but for the people that it did crash for do you sync among devices? Maybe that has something to do with it?
Wha ... how ... why would browser performance be coupled to performance of one particular site? Firefox, Opera, even IE don't crash when they're offline and unable to connect to any site.
Chrome is also crashing for me. It gives this error - Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library/ Runtime Error! / Program: C:\User... "This application has requested the runtime to terminate it in an unusual way" / "Please contact the application's support team for more information."
It may be region specific, it's still down for me.
I've noticed that Hacker News seems slower since gmail went down. I'd be interested to know how traffic responded. I'm guessing a lot of people default to HN if they hit a roadblock in their work. I know I do.
Just to add some data: Did not crash for me. I am using sync and I have two gmail tabs open. However gmail has continued to work for me, only the chat has had some issues.
My Chrome is continually crashing here on a MacBook Pro Retina as well. Even just visiting unrelated sites like Android Market and others. I assume it is trying to sync my pages to my account, or pull down URL malware black lists or something, hitting the same error GMail is hitting, and crashing.
I was able to reproduce the crash once by adding a bookmark, which probably forces a sync. Gmail came back up for me, though, so I'm not able to test this again.
No crash here, using Chromium ver 22.0.1190.0, compiled from source. However, GMail is extremely slow. Have been able to refresh (and access) it 3 times in the past 5 minutes.
Edit: Nobody was using Gmail at any point.