Gmail down -- and now back up!

This is broadly known in the tech world, but for the purposes of the Atlantic's site this will be the official announcement that: for at least the last hour, Gmail has been inaccessible through most of the normal means-of-access. OTOH, I am still getting Gmail messages on my Blackberry, since I have Gmail set up to bounce a copy of all incoming info there. So some of the lower-brainstem functions of Gmail are still intact. Depending on how long this takes to clear up -- next few minutes, another hour or two -- will no doubt set off various speculation about the vulnerability of cloud computing, about whether there are some aspects of scale too vast even for the unimaginably vast collection of Google servers, whether Twitter (now ablaze with reports) could be brought down in collateral damage, and so on. All of that in due course. Right now, it's like living through real-time tech history!

5:14 pm EDT: It's back! At least for the moment. Will be interesting to hear this sleuthed out.
 
(Updated official Google status reports here.)