**Google has confirmed its e-mail service Gmail was unavailable to the “majority” of its 150 million worldwide users for nearly two hours.**The cause of Tuesday’s outage - which it later said had been rectified - was not immediately clear.
Google’s last major technical problem happened in May, with millions of people unable to use its main search page, as well as Gmail and Google News.
It follows outages of the Gmail service in February and March.
“We know many of you are having trouble accessing Gmail right now - we are too, and we definitely feel your pain,” said Google’s engineering director David Besbris in a blog post on Tuesday.
The free version of Gmail has been ranked as the world’s third most-popular e-mail program, behind similar services provided by Microsoft and Yahoo.