A blackout hit Gmail from Google on Tuesday. The business of the e-mail service and its consumer users were all affected by the unhappy event. The popular e-mail service collapsed and went offline at 9:30 GMT and regained status after almost four hours. Statistics show that this has been the longest time for a Google downtime.

According to comScore, more than 113 million have an account on Gmail. Google had already apologized to its users for the inconvenient that the blackout might have meant for many of them. The giant search engine added that they knew how important the Gmail service is for their users so they will take the matter very seriously.

As comScore reported, Google’s Gmail is on the third place among the most popular web mail services, as long as Hotmail has 283 million users and Yahoo 274 million. The same statistics show that nearly a million businesses use the professional set of applications from Google, including Gmail. Even Google uses and relies on its services.

The spokespersons from the company were unable to use the e-mail services as to send messages to the journalists about the issue. A service legal agreement is stated between Google and its professional users through which the company promises to be 99.9% operational during any month of the year. In addition, the premier edition of the Applications service costs $50 for a year of usage.

In 2008, the Gmail service from Google was affected by an average of 10 to 15 minutes of downtime every month and the last one had taken place in August when the users of the e-mail service were unable to sign in to their accounts for a couple of hours.