Google’s Gmail online e-mail service ran out of juice Tuesday morning for users in Europe and possibly worldwide.

British users noticed Gmail conked out around 10:30 local time, or 5:30 a.m. EST.

Reports came in from the U.S. that it had stopped working there as well. Tests in New York revealed intermittent service.

Google technicians were “working on it,” according to a report in the Times of London.

“We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a number of users,” Google said in an advisory on its Gmail support site. “We’re working hard to resolve this problem and will post updates as we have them. We apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused.”

Google has had trouble with Gmail before, setting off waves of concerns over the reliability of the service.

Last August, Gmail had three significant outages that affected not only individual consumers of the free Web mail service but also companies and organizations paying for Apps Premier, the company’s hosted suite of collaboration, messaging and office productivity services. Apps Premier costs US$50 per user per year.

To compensate for the downtime, Google decided to extend a credit to all Apps Premier customers and also said it would get better at notifying people of problems. Google offers a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee for Gmail for users paying for Google Apps Premier.

(YWN Desk – NYC)