(Zack Whittaker for Between the Lines) Summary: Gmail suffered a widespread outage earlier today. It's not yet clear what caused the problems, but in many cases it also caused Chrome browsers to crash worldwide.

Gmail was hit with an outage at around 12 midday ET. Screenshot: ZDNet

Gmail is down... and it's up again, in what may be the strangest, shortest outage the company's cloud-based email service has suffered in memory. 

Gmail suffered from a widespread outage earlier today. First reported from social media services -- such as Facebook and Twitter -- many were unable to access their Google-based email accounts for minutes.

At 12:30 p.m. ET, Google said that it was "investigating reports of an issue with Google Mail," and said it would provide more information shortly. It did not offer anything else, except marking it has a "service disruption," rather than a "service outage."

At 1:10 p.m. ET, Google gave the all-clear and said that the "problem with Google Mail should be resolved." Google also noted a problem with Google Drive, which has also been fixed.

ZDNet's Rachel King said that her personal email account was down, while our Google Apps-powered email system remained "spotty." All in all, it appears that Google was down for only a few minutes -- perhaps no 15-20 minutes or so -- but it certainly left its mark on social media feeds.

Many users received 502 server errors when visiting their Gmail. So far, there's nothing from Google on the official Twitter accounts and no word back from the company. (Perhaps their Gmail is down? I jest...) 

Google Apps was not reporting any outages at the time of writing, suggesting that Google Apps for Business, Government and Education users were not affected.

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