I was about to incessantly complain to my internet service provider again about how their services suck because I was trying to access Gmail and it wasn’t loading. Apparently the problem was on Google’s end.

Here is the official statement from GMail’s support pages:

Status Update (2/24/2009)

We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a number of users. This problem occurred at approximately 1.30AM Pacific Time. We’re working hard to resolve this problem and will post updates as we have them. We apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused.

On another note, it’s fun to see how the folks over at Twitter react when something happens to one of Google’s services, such as today’s Gmail outage. You’d see endless updates from Twitter users all over the world.

Update: Gmail problems seem to have been fixed.

Statement from Official Google Blog:

Lots of folks are asking what happened, so we thought you’d like an explanation. This morning, there was a routine maintenance event in one of our European data centers. This typically causes no disruption because accounts are simply served out of another data center.

Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data center in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data center to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control.

The bugs have been found and fixed, and we’re in the process of pushing out changes. We know how painful an outage like this is — we run Google on Gmail, so outages like this affect us the same way they affect you. We always investigate the root causes of rare outages like this one, so we can prevent similar problems in the future.

Acacio Cruz, Gmail Site Reliability Manager

More information elsewhere:

• Google users hit by mail blackout (BBC News UK)
• Gmail Down, Panic Mode On (Mashable)
• Current Gmail Outage (Official Google Blog)
• Users panic as Google Mail goes down (vnunet.com)