***UPDATE*** Here's what Google said about the outage so far on the Gmail blog, not much.

"We've fixed the issue, and Gmail should be back up and running as usual. We're still investigating the root cause of this outage, and we'll share more information soon. Thanks for bearing with us."

***UPDATE*** Gmail is back up and running, for me at least...I'll post Google's explanation to the outage when it releases it.

Gmail is down.  I've been seeing this message for the past hour when trying to access my email.  I'm sure if you access Gmail via your browser, you're seeing it as well.  Google has acknowledged the problem in its blog stating, 

"We know many of you are having trouble accessing Gmail right now — we are too, and we definitely feel your pain. We don't usually post about minor issues here (the Apps status dashboard and the Gmail Help Center are usually where this kind of information goes). Because this is impacting so many of you, we wanted to let you know we're currently looking into the issue and hope to have more info to share here shortly. If you have IMAP or POP set up already, you should be able to access your mail that way in the meantime. We're terribly sorry for the inconvenience and will get Gmail back up and running as soon as possible." 

If you have your Gmail account set up on your iPhone, you should be able to access your mail, it works fine on mine.  

This isn't Gmail's first outage - earlier this year, the service experienced a two-hour outage on February 24th, which raises the question of the reliability of cloud-computing services, in which users rely on software and services living up on the Web in order to get important work done.  Some of these companies which offer cloud-based services include Salesforce and all of Google's App's. 

Earlier this year, Coghead, a cloud-based services that allowed users to build applications on top of its platform, went out of business, leaving its users with two months to download and try and rebuild the data from their applications - pretty much screwed.

Anyways, Google hasn't said anything else yet on when Gmail will be up and running again with full functionality. 

How is the Gmail outage affecting you?  Leave a comment and let us know.