• by Ray Schultz , October 4, 2021

Even as Facebook suffers a massive outage, Gmail users are complaining of the inability to get their emails. 

Complaints peaked around 5 p.m. ET on downdetector, with users griping about the website (55%),  the server connection (26%) and receiving (19%).  

“Google, Facebook, this is the end my friends, digital world war has begun,” writes one Gmail user. 

“Can not get my emails and do my work,” writes another. 

The problems -- which do not appear to be as intense those facing Facebook users -- are affecting the East Coast and parts of the Midwest, judging by the downdetector map. This reporter had no trouble getting on Gmail at 5:30 p.m. ET. 

According to Heavy.com, Google’s Cloud Status service comments as follows: “Global: Issue impacting a subset of Google App Engine customers due to the ‘Let’s Encrypt’ certification expiration. Mitigation work by our engineering team is currently still in progress.” 

Google continues: “We do not have an ETA for mitigation at this point. Impacted customers may be experiencing build failures and receive an error message related to ‘certificate verification failed’ or ‘SSL connection could not be established’. We will provide more information by Monday, 2021-10-04 17:00 US/Pacific.”

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp continued to suffer serious outages on Monday, wth the peak occurring around midday. Tens of thousands of complaints were posted on downdetector, according to reports.