Gmail Goes Dark for 2 Hours; Email Addicts Freak

Google's Gmail was largely inaccessible for 2 hours yesterday, as both the company and compulsive email checkers struggled to figure out what went wrong, the Los Angeles Times reports. The blackout was followed by a flurry of anxious web-chatter on the subject of the much relied-upon email service. The company later blamed the downtime on an internal outage.

"It made me less productive because I needed to make sure I was communicating with my friends," complained one Gmail user, "but we were communicating via other means that weren’t as efficient as Gmail." (More Google stories.)