Google has managed to rapidly solve a glitch that plagued its e-mail service, Gmail. According to various reports, the service was down for a couple of hours and the problems begun at around 2 P.M Pacific Time or 21:00 GMT.

Apparently, the most affected were the Gmail users from United States, Canda and India.

However, Google was quick to solve the problem, which was caused by a temporary outage in Gmail contacts system, as the Gmail team stated in a post on the service’s official blog.

“We've identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that affect Gmail and our other services, we're conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly,” the Gmail team added.

Gmail, Google’s take on Web mail, was launched as an invitation-only beta in 2004 and it was open to the general public three years later, in February 2007.

In June this year, Google decided that Gmail should have its own Labs. With Gmail Labs, the users could catch a glimpse of some new features and decide if they like them or not.

According to comScore, a company that is tracking web traffic, approximately 20 million users are using Gmail on daily basis.

In February, Microsoft run into some trubles with its e-mail service, Windows Live Mail, also known as Hotmail, due to a glitch
related to Windows Live ID.