Gmail status

How we check Gmail

We watch mail.google.com from all five of our probe regions, every 2 minutes. A region that sees a failure does not make this page say "down" on its own: a second region has to agree first, the same confirmation rule every YoPingMe monitor uses.

We watch the host Gmail itself is served from and pin the response an anonymous request receives, rather than assuming a 2xx. Google's status dashboard covers every Workspace product on one page, so a Gmail-specific reading of the product people actually use is a narrower and more direct signal than the dashboard alone.

What is Gmail?

Gmail is the email service most people and a great many businesses use by default, and it sits inside the larger Google Workspace product line alongside Drive, Calendar, and Meet. That context matters for reading any incident: Gmail can be degraded on its own, or it can be caught up in something affecting Workspace more broadly, and the two look different from the inside even when they look identical to a user staring at an inbox that will not load.

The distinction between Gmail being unreachable and a specific email not arriving is the one worth holding onto first. Gmail being down means the service itself will not load or respond. A message not arriving is a delivery problem, and delivery has its own long list of independent causes: spam filtering on the receiving end, a bounce from an address that no longer exists, or ordinary delay at another provider's mail servers. All of these can happen while Gmail is working exactly as intended, and none of them will show up on any status page because nothing on Google's side has actually failed.

Applications that send mail programmatically through the Gmail API or an SMTP relay depend on the same backend as the consumer product, even though the failure mode looks different from the outside. A web interface that will not load and an API returning elevated errors can be two symptoms of the same underlying incident, which is worth knowing when deciding whether a spike in application errors is a code problem or a platform one.

Attachments are a specific source of confusion inside Gmail itself. Beyond a certain size, attachments are handled through Google Drive rather than through Gmail's own mail storage, so a failure uploading or downloading a large file can originate in Drive while the rest of Gmail, including sending and receiving ordinary mail, works normally. The interface hides this distinction, since both appear inside the same inbox, which is exactly why it is worth checking Drive specifically before concluding Gmail itself has a problem.

The wider point about depending on Gmail, personally or as a business, is that its scale is also its stability. It runs at a size that makes partial degradation more common than total unavailability, and most things reported as "Gmail is down" turn out to be one feature, one account, or one delivery path rather than the whole service. Reading which piece actually failed is most of what determines whether the right response is to wait or to look elsewhere in the chain.

Frequently asked questions

Is Gmail down right now?

Check the board above; it reflects our own probes against Gmail from all five of our regions, refreshed every couple of minutes and confirmed across two regions before this page would call it down.

I sent an email and it has not arrived. Is Gmail down?

Usually not, and delivery failing is a different event from Gmail being unreachable. Spam filtering on the recipient's side, a bounce from an invalid address, or a delay at the receiving mail server can all produce a missing email while Gmail's own systems are entirely healthy. Check the sent folder and any bounce notice before assuming an outage.

Does a Gmail outage affect mail sent through the Gmail API by an application?

It can, since applications sending through the Gmail API or SMTP relay depend on the same backend infrastructure that serves the web and mobile apps, even though the failure can surface differently. An application seeing elevated errors from Google's mail APIs during a period this page shows as down is very likely experiencing the same incident, not a coincidence.

How is this page different from the Google Workspace Status Dashboard?

Their dashboard reports what Google has confirmed internally, across every Workspace product including Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and Meet, at a level of detail no outside probe can match. This page reports what our own probes measured against Gmail specifically, from outside Google's infrastructure, on a fixed schedule, whether or not Google has posted an update yet.

My email account works but attachments will not upload. Is that a Gmail problem?

Possibly not Gmail specifically. Large attachments in Gmail are handled through Google Drive once they pass a size threshold, so a failure uploading one can originate in Drive rather than in Gmail's mail-handling systems, even though both surface inside the same interface. Worth checking whether Drive is behaving normally elsewhere before treating it as a Gmail incident.