Google has made a public apology to its users following an outage that prevented its email service from loading properly for both individual and corporate customers.

According to the blog posting, Google will conduct a full review of what went wrong and will update its internal procedures accordingly.

"We don’t usually post about problems like this on our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted," noted Todd Jackson, Gmail product manager.

Jackson acknowledged that Google had received a large amount of calls from Google Apps customers following the downtime, as well as from those who use Gmail for company email. Google had also seen many Twitter posts, he added.

The Gmail problems follow Google Docs and Spreadsheets access problems in July when customers were locked out of their cloud-based applications for over an hour.

Google cannot afford to have further downtime problems as Microsoft is soon to launch its own online services offerings. Due out in early 2009, Microsoft’s Business Productivity Suite will offer customers a subscription service encompassing a range of Microsoft software, including Exchange, Dynamics, and Office SharePoint, Communications and Meeting for around £90.