Heaven help us. Russia is bombing Georgia, the ice caps are melting, France is still a sovereign nation, and Gmail is down. It's not an isolated incident as people on Twitter are reporting the same problem:
Whatever could be the problem? I've never really had any issues with Gmail. Interestingly enough, I can use Gmail over IMAP on my iPhone. Weird.
One clue may be (yes, I'm really reaching here) is this new "Create an account" button I saw this morning:
Most of the time it's just a text link, although occasionally I've seen it as a blue Aqua-esque button. New UI?
What do you think? Is Google rolling out a new UI? Is it a technical glitch? Are they going to give us Push functionality? Has your account been affected? Let me know in the comments.
UPDATE: I saw a Cult of Mac article in my feed reader saying MobileMe's mail is also down.
Oddly, when I clicked the link in my feed reader to go to the actual article, Cult of Mac gave me an error page. Hmmm...strange stuff is afoot. Perhaps my initial hunch that Apple just transitioned all their .Mac stuff to Google's services, masked in a pretty Apple design, is true. ;)
UPDATE 2: TechCrunch is reporting the same thing: Gmail is down systemwide. As a side note, I'd like to point out that I had the "story" up before Arrington did. ;)
UPDATE 3: As of about 4:35, my account is back. Same ol' look and at first glance no new features. Also, no word on the Official Gmail Blog about the outage.
