TechCrunch is reporting (and I’m currently experiencing) an unprecedented failure of Google’s popular web-based email solution Gmail. Twitter is abuzz with the outage, suggesting a significant percentage of its millions of users are currently affected.

Fail Mail.

When logging into my Gmail account, all I see is:

In the two minutes that have elapsed since starting this post, the number of tweets related to “gmail” has doubled from 571 to nearly 1300.

Even the mighty fall sometimes, which serves as a consumer level reinforcement of a doubt that already lingers with cynical privacy advocates doubtful of the value of the concept of “your life in the cloud.”

Hosted services seem like nothing but win right up until times like this, when the only throat to choke is your own.

With an estimated 20 million users worldwide, one wonders how many thousands of dollars Google is losing per second in ad revenue from this outage.

Update: Gmail service is beginning to get restored. Total outage weighs in at a little more than half an hour total. Here’s a graph of the outrage expressed on Twitter:

Five minutes in, everybody goes apeshit.

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