Yikes. Gmail seems to be down right now, folks. Why? No idea. The official GMail Twitter doesn't say, neither does the Google one. We'll update as soon as we know more.

UPDATE: And we're back. Whew. A chilling future of denizens using @yahoo suffixes has, at least for now, been averted. The blackout happened for roughly 20 minutes. From a TechCrunch report:

Gmail is currently experiencing what appears to be a widespread outage, with reports coming in from Europe, the U.S., Canada, India and beyond that Google’s email service is down. We’re still seeing a green light (update: now showing red as of around 2:20 ET) on the App Status dashboard, but are trying to find out more about the problem.

The error being seen by most users at the moment is a (500) code problem, which pretty much just indicates that it’s a temporary problem and doesn’t give a clue as to cause. Judging by the response on Twitter, however, the problem is currently affecting a huge number of users. Google+ is also down, although you’d be forgiven for not having noticed that sooner.

Aside from some minor glitchiness, that concludes Gmail Crisis Watch 2014.