Gmail, the fast growing free email service provider in the world, has experienced another service outage in different parts of the world this Thursday. It has experienced several such outages, owing to different technical reasons, in the past few months.

Gmail lets Internet users write/send e-mail messages, archive documents/emails, chat online, and store contact lists.

Clarifying on the issue, Google Inc has posted a note stating that all e-mail service was working by 11 a.m. ET, and the problems have only caused email to slow down a bit, and it did not crash as some news reports had claimed. The company in its report further stated that “A problem with Google Contacts caused many Gmail users to experience slowness and degraded service for about an hour today.” “We’re sorry for the inconvenience. As usual, we’ll provide an incident report on the Google Apps Status Dashboard, where we also gave ongoing status updates as this issue progressed.”

As with the previous cases of Gmail outage, the current episode has also triggered an animated discussion/debate in the online community, especially among those who rely heavily on Gmail for their professional as well as daily personal communication. But this time around, fortunately, the outage was short lived, and before most of its users could knew about it, Gmail was able to put its defense back in place, inside an hour or so since the outage occurred. Perhaps, these days, Google Inc has become well versed in damage control management as well!