According to online incident monitoring website DownDetector, Google's Gmail experienced problems at around 3:00 p.m. on August 8 (US time) after the information site recorded nearly 5,000 error reports within an hour.

DownDetector said 82% of the reports were issues related to sending emails, with only about 15% related to errors connecting directly to the server, according to the New York Post .

Most people experiencing the problem get a red message that says: “Message could not be sent. Check your network connection and try again.”

The Gmail outage was widespread across the United States, particularly affecting the country's most populous metropolitan areas like New York City.

Many of the 1.8 billion Gmail users worldwide have taken to social media to lament the rare problem they've encountered with the popular email service.

Some people commented on DownDetector: “I can't type or send emails because it keeps crashing”, “I can't get my work done”, “I can only send one attachment, but not many”, “I can't even attach files to emails”...

As of 5 p.m. on August 8, DownDetector still had no exact estimate of how many individuals and businesses were affected by the Gmail outage.

Google has yet to issue a statement or explanation about the Gmail outage, and the company has not yet responded to a request for comment from the New York Post .