Google and Gmail users are dealing with more issues this week, following reports of a disruption in the popular webmail service. Although not as bad as a complete outage this time, Gmail users found themselves deprived of the contact list feature, rendering them unable to search through or use contacts altogether.

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"Is it fair to shine a spotlight on every problem Gmail suffers?" I don't believe so. I also have 3 Yahoo! e-mail accounts and there is not a day that goes by where they don't suffer connectivity/functionality issues. In fact, they're so bad, I only use them for online ordering as I know that I'm immediately going to get spammed as soon as I place an order.
Google Mail - for the most part - has been the most reliant free e-mail service I've experienced, even with the last two week's issues. I'm not sure why they get singled out whenever an issue pops up.

Google want to replace the web. If their stance was anything less than total domination I wouldn't care but since it is, I believe it needs to be pointed out when their services fail before we start relying on a single company to provide all our online content and applications.

To report the 'news' is not a biased comment. It helps others understand the symptoms they too may be seeing and to be tolerant, especially when the information identifies 'transient' types of problems.

You want to see bias in action? look up the {Windows vs. OSX vs. Linux} junk that gets reported as news

The system has now been down about 12 hours... that is a long outtage for Google.

I never even saw this since my email account is tied into my Outlook. However I just checked it and it seems to be fine.

You asked if it is fair to shine a spotlight on Google if their service is fault...yet you are shining a spotlight...just a thought...

@greyd, this article is simply stating that if Gmail users noticed this, "this is what happened" it's not shining any spotlights of any kind, just answering questions which users may have had.
Plain and simple!

hum; must be a local condition, as my gmail has been running without any issues