Significant delays affected certain Gmail users on Thursday, and Google says you may need to send that email again. According to Google’s Workspace status page, emails from Gmail users sent between 11:30 AM EST and 2:00 PM EST on Thursday may not have gone through or were significantly delayed.
“New emails should generally not be seeing any issues,” said Google this afternoon. “However, older emails will be auto retried and should be delivered within the next couple of hours,” said Google.
It’s estimated there are 1.8 billion Gmail users worldwide, sending billions of emails every hour. Google first reported the issue at 11:30AM on Thursday, saying “Customers impacted by this issue may see delay in sending the emails.” It’s unclear how many emails this affected. 9to5Google reported delayed emails from Google Workspace accounts, which largely belong to enterprises.
The problem persisted until just after 2:00PM when Google reported that the problem would no longer affect new emails, but old emails could take hours to be pushed through to their recipient. As a workaround, Google said Gmail customers can retry sending any emails sent during this time frame if they have not gone through.
At least 700 people experienced issues with Gmail today according to outage tracker Downdetector. Several users reported their offices experienced issues, and that emails were showing as sent on Gmail, but no one was receiving them.
As of 5:00PM, Google wrote that the problem with email delays was mitigated for most users. The company is conducting an internal investigation of the incident and will publish an analysis in the near future. Tomorrow, Friday, is also the last day to activate an old Gmail account before Google deactivates them forever.