BREAKING NEWS: URGENT -- Gmail outage affects users worldwide

USPA News - A large number of users of the popular webmail service Gmail were unable to access their accounts on early Friday afternoon, according to users affected by the outage. Google did not immediately comment on the outage that appeared to be worldwide.

The problems began at around 2 p.m. EST (11 a.m. PST) when users started seeing a "temporary error" message. "We`re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable," the error message said. "We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes." As of 2:15 p.m. EST (11:15 a.m. PST), Google`s Apps Status Dashboard gave no indication of a service disruption. Other services such as Google Drive and Google Talk did not appear to have been affected by Friday`s outage, which follows a Gmail outage in April 2012 that affected an estimated 35 million users. Gmail has approximately 350 million users worldwide.