Gmail is Down – What To Do?

Last Tuesday Gmail had a 3 hours outage and it seemed like the world was going to end, considering all the Twitter and Facebook cries of panic. It’s clear that a lot of people rely on Gmail as a work tool, and the possibility of such “glitches” happening is something to worry about. But there are a few things you can do when it seems you can’t access your Gmail account properly:

• Maybe the problem is just with your connection, and not with Gmail itself. You can find out about the status on Gmail and several other Google apps in their Google Apps Status Dashboard;
• If the web interface is not loading properly, you can try accessing the more secure SSL interface or the basic HTML mode;
• You can also access your email using POP or IMAP on any email client of your choice. During the outage this was the only way of accessing Gmail, but you had to have it enabled, which can only be done through the web interface (Gmail settings/ Forwarding and POP, IMAP). It’s probably a good idea to just enable it even if you don’t plan on using anything besides the web interface. Just in case… 

So the next time Gmail seems to be down, don’t panic. First try the items above. And if none of them works, then you can panic