Gmail hit by message delivery delay

Delays affected the delivery of messages to Gmail users Tuesday morning, days after key Google Web apps, including Docs and Drive, were hit by a bug lasting more than five hours.

Google acknowledged the Gmail problem at around 5 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time on its Apps Status Dashboard, saying that “messages are being received with a delay.”

The issue was declared solved at around 7:30 a.m., when Google posted an update note saying that “most” of the delayed messages had been delivered and that the “remaining messages” would be delivered “over the next hours.”

Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the cause and scope of the problem. It’s not clear whether some messages are still backed up in the delivery queue.

On Thursday, Google’s Drive cloud storage service, Docs word processing and Sheet spreadsheet applications, as well as its Sites intranet builder, suffered what the company described as a “service disruption.” At the time, a Google spokeswoman declined to provide details about what caused that problem and about how many people were affected.

The glitches to Google’s Web apps come at the same time that Microsoft is making a renewed push with its competing products. Microsoft last week upgraded its browser-based version of Office and rebranded it as Office Online, in an attempt to encourage more people to use this free version of the suite.