Google suffered an outage in some of their services yesterday that affected almost 10% of their user base, or about 30 million subscribers.

Google acknowledge that their service was down and they’re investigating as to what caused the problem.

“We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Mail. We will provide more information shortly,” Google’s Apps status dashboard stated yesterday.

A report from CNET stated that some subscribers reported having issues with Google Docs and Google+ aside from Gmail.  The outage started at about 12:42 p.m. EDT on Tuesday and lasted for a couple of hours.  People started tweeting about the outage.

Google was able to resolve the issue quickly and tweeted “#Gmail should be back for some of you already, and will be back for everyone soon. Thanks for your patience,” but some users report that they’re still experiencing some Gmail issues today.

Reports stated that only the web interface of their service was affected, and users were still able to access their messages on desktop and mobile clients using IMAP and POP3.
Google hasn’t released an official statement as to what caused the outage.

This isn’t the first time that Google patrons suffered an outage in recent months.  At the end of October last year, people reported having trouble accessing their mail but the issue was quickly resolved.  Google didn’t release a statement as to what caused the disruption then either, but some speculated that it was due to adverse weather.

This year, Facebook and Microsoft also suffered service outages.  In March, some Facebookers in Europe and Asia reported having trouble accessing their accounts so they used the next best thing – Twitter.  While Microsoft’s Azure was down last February 29 and the outage was reported to be a date-related glitch, as in leap day which happens every four years, so the day was dubbed as the Leap Day Outage.

In 2011, a lot of companies also suffered service outages but the most memorable ones are from Research in Motion, which lasted a few days and angered many BlackBerry users, Amazon Web Services, which caused some big name startups including Rapportive, Reddit, Foursquare, Hootsuite and Heroku to become unavailable, Sony’s PlayStation Network, because it was breached and a lot of user accounts were compromised, and Microsoft suffered outages because of a malfunctioning Cisco gear and their DNS address system.

Everyone always hopes that services outages will never happen again, especially the businesses that lose money and have to deal with angry customers.  But mistakes happen, nothing’s ever perfect and these are the terms we must cope with in our technologically advanced times.