San Francisco - Google's online Gmail application failed for the second time this month on Thursday, leaving an unknown number of users without access to their messages. The crash lasted a couple of hours and came just a day after the company's Google News service was also out of action.
The outage was seen as a blow to Google's ambitions to lure business users to its online documentation programs and away from Microsoft's dominant Office productivity suite.
"A problem with Google Contacts caused many Gmail users to experience slowness and degraded service for about an hour today," Google said in a statement.
"Mail was back to full speed for everyone around 8 am Pacific (1500 GMT) and the issue affecting Contacts was resolved shortly after. We are sorry for the inconvenience."
