UPDATE 1 -- Gmail outage affects users worldwide

USPA News - A large number of users of the popular webmail service Gmail were unable to access their accounts on Friday, according to users affected by the outage. Google confirmed it is investigating a service disruption that also appeared to affect social networking website Google+.

The problems began at around 2 p.m. EST (11 a.m. PST) when Gmail users started seeing a "temporary error" message. "We`re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable," the error message said. "We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes." About 15 minutes later, Google confirmed on its Apps Status Dashboard that it was investigating "reports of an issue with Gmail," but did not indicate how many users were affected. It did not confirm issues with other Google services, but many users also experienced problems when accessing Google+ and Blogger. Friday`s outage follows a Gmail outage in April 2012 that affected approximately 10 percent of its user base, or some 42 million users, but the problems were resolved in less than an hour. Gmail has approximately 425 million active users worldwide, according to the most recent figure provided in June 2012.