The GMail service appeared to go offline at around 0930 GMT and was unavailable for approximately two and a half hours, Google claimed. Some users claimed to be off for about four hours. POP/IMAP Email and the web application were unavailable although, strangely I could still access email using my iPhone!

In a statement released on the official google blog it said: “We’re really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could.”

Engineers were still investigating the cause of the problem and it is yet to be determined whether the problem was a system malfunction, human error or even and attack.

Google is the third most popular web email service with 113 million users, behind Hotmail (283 million) and Yahoo (274 million).

Only last week, google announced it’s Offline feature which allows users to store a portion of their emails locally. For those that had this feature installed, they were still able to view old emails as well as create new ones. New emails were sent out when the service resumed.

To set up Offline Gmail all you need to do it the following:-

• Click Settings from your GMail Web Application
• Click the “Labs” tab
• At the top of the List should be the Offline GMail Feature, Enable it here and click Save at the bottom of the page
• When the page reloads, click the small icon in the top right corner to begin the installation of Google Gears. Follow through the installation and your all set !