Gmail Goes Down Across the World: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

(Gmail)

According to multiple reports coming in across social media, Gmail was down for users in the U.S., Europe and Asia for some time. Services have now returned.

This is a breaking story so please stay tuned for updates.

Here’s what you need to know:

1. The error is a “500” which usually means that it’s temporary but gives no clue to users as to what the cause is.

2. According to Tech Crunch, the outage also affects YouTube, Google Hangout and Google +.

3. The company showed no problems on their own status page.

4. Most commonly, Gmail outages are related to internal software updates.

5. Yahoo commented on the outage:

Gmail is temporarily unavailable pic.twitter.com/KLNxcQ9zUP

— Yahoo (@Yahoo) January 24, 2014