UPDATE: 8 am EST

Gmail seems to be partially back up, with many users reporting strange errors. I just got in but only after filling out a CAPTCHA because Google thought my request was coming from a spam bots. Others are reporting bad security certificate warnings and some can?? get in at all. There?? a bit of irony in Twitter keeping us up to date on the gmail Fail Whale.

After nearly six years in business, Google?? Gmail is still officially classified as ??eta.?Maybe there’s a reason.

The service has suffered an embarrassing string of breakdowns lately and htis morning appears to be entirely unavailable. No word from Google yet, but the outage set off a major Twitter storm as users vented their frustration.