Gmail is broken right now, one day after a massive outage (Update: Fixed?)

While it doesn’t appear to be completely down like it was yesterday morning, we’re hearing many reports from Gmail users that the email service is having major issues right now.

Some users are reporting that Gmail is particularly slow, while others are reporting constant error messages. One TechCrunch writer, meanwhile, noticed that emails he was sending to Gmail accounts appeared to immediately bounce, with Gmail’s server responding with an error reading “550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist.”

Google confirms the issues on its services dashboard, writing at 1:30 PM Pacific that they’re impacting a “significant” number of users:

We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior.

In a second update at 2:30 PM, Google says its teams are “continuing to investigate this issue”; as of 3:30 PM, the company says it expects the issues to be fixed by 4:00 PM while noting that time may change.

Update, 4:15 PM Pacific: Google now says the problems have been resolved.

Meanwhile, encrypted email service ProtonMail tweets that the email bouncing issue mentioned above is widespread, with many emails sent to Gmail users bouncing permanently:

Gmail is currently suffering a serious outage and permanently bouncing emails sent to Gmail users. The problem is on Google's side, and is impacting all email traffic (not specific to ProtonMail). We will continue monitoring the situation.

— Proton (@ProtonPrivacy) December 15, 2020

If you’re sending an email of any importance to a Gmail user right now, you’ll want to wait until this is fully fixed; if you’ve sent one in the last few hours, double check it was actually received.

Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs and other services go down in multiple countries (Update: slowly coming back online)