Google, Gmail experiencing downtime around the world

Update: Gmail/Google Apps Email is currently down*

Several users are complaining on Twitter that Google, Gmail and Doubleclick (owned by Google) are down.

Dutch news service NU.nl briefly had to remove their ads (server by Doubleclick) because they weren’t loading and thus slowing down their sites. Since then they have placed the ads back so Doubleclick seems to be up again.

We could only verify the downtime for Canada which gives us a 502 server error and Google.us which seems to work for some but not for others:

Strangely enough adding ‘www’ in front of Google.ca does give us a Google front page which would suggest a simple DNS problem.

Google Apps Status also reports a ‘Service Disruption’ in their dashboard but I could access my own Gmail account just fine. On Saturday Google Calendar was inaccessible for a few users but this was fixed within a few hours.

The 502 error that users are currently seeing generally means that there is some type of miscommunication between a web server a database server. or in more technical terms: “the upstream server and the gateway/proxy do not agree on the protocol for exchanging data”.

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