London, Dec. 11 : Google's popular web-based email service, Gmail, reportedly suffered a global outage, leaving millions of people around the world getting cut off from their messages.

Google's apps status dashboard, which tracks the availability of its web services, did not register the outage for half an hour, while consumer and business visitors to Gmail. com were greeted by an error page.

The type of error, with the code 502, indicated that proxy servers, which act as a middleman between web browsers and the Gmail servers, were unable to communicate with the Gmail servers. However, access via smartphone apps appeared unaffected, The Telegraph reports.

However, after about 10 minutes, the service was restored, albeit intermittently at first and with some functions, such as Gmail chat, still unavailable, the paper said.

Gmail also suffered a failure last week for which Google apologised to users worldwide over the inconvenience caused due the same.

"We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better," Google said. (ANI)