Approx 150million users were affected when the Gmail service run by Google was disrupted due a miscalculation by one of their engineers. Although it was for two hours it has been classed as a ‘big deal’ and investigations are underway to ensure it doesn’t happen again. The blackout occurred whilst carrying out routine upgrades to the company’s web server – outages have already taken place in February and March. It’s said that in this instance engineers slightly underestimated the increased load put on other parts of the system hence cause the widespread blackout. Access through desktop email programs seem to have been unaffected. Gmail itself has been ranked as the 3 most popular email program after services from Microsoft and Yahoo.