A maintenance error caused disruption to Google's Gmail service, affecting the "majority" of its millions of email users.
The disruption lasted for nearly two hours and was caused by an error during routine maintenance of the firm's internet servers.
The free email service users received an "Unable to reach Gmail" error message as their computers tried to reconnect to the service.
The tens of millions affected by the outage included consumers who get free Gmail as well as businesses that pay for their accounts.
Google said that it has added capacity and made other changes to prevent similar incidents in the future. A separate outage on Monday had wiped out email to a "small subset" of users.
According to figures from comScore Inc., Gmail, with around 150 million users worldwide, was the world's third most-popular email program in June. It stands after free email services offered by Microsoft and Yahoo!.
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