Gmail is down

Gmail has been down for the past hour. The site either appears to load but then the user is unable to to login or the site does not load at all and a server error page is loading.

Something pretty bad is happening because Google is usually able to resolve this issues (fix the problem or redirect the traffic to another cluster) in a matter of minutes, but not this time. We will have to wait and see if there is some kind of formal announcement.

Update 1:
Gmail team has acknowledged the problem in their blog:

Update (2:37 pm): 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 2:
Gmail tracked the problem and posted on the Gmail Blog about the issue. Turns out it was an overload on their request servers.

In other news battle.net has thrown me out from my Diablo 2 session and I cannot connect back to the game(past the game room screen that is)....what is it with today?

Sending Empty Messages on Gmail

A nice litlle new  gmail feature was released. Now you can send empty messages without body without the gmail asking you about confirmation. The addition of the feature was confirmed by the gmail Blog. 

 I know that it is no big thing to take the extra second to click the ok button,  but I am bothered everytime I want to do that. This is mainly because sending an email without a body means that you have nothing to say but a quick question that you usually put on the subject of the email. In order avoid gmail's confirmation dialog just type EOM at the end of the subject line. 

What is wrong with gmail?

I have been a gmail user for years. In fact, I redirect all my email accounts to it so I can view them from there. Lately, though, I have been having some problems . For starters the whole service is getting slower. No matter what I do it seems to be slower. This might be due to the fact that they have changed the whole thing so all request go through https instead of http after the security hole that was discovered. I do not know, this is just a theory.

Another very annoying thing is that 9 out of 10 times the "view image" functionality does not work. You know..the view image, when there is an image attached on the email. I get a Temporary Error (502). It used to be very helpful to view a single page with all the images attached on it. Now, I have to download the image one by one in order to view them in full resolution. What is up with that?
I have been reading that they are making some heavy changes but gmail is in beta since day one and it worked despite the daily changes. Anyway, lets hope that everything will get fixed soon.