NEWS

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Google Inc.'s popular email service suffered a widespread outage Tuesday, though the cause of the service disruption was not immediately clear.

A number of online commenters posted complaints about losing access to Google's /quotes/comstock/15*!goog/quotes/nls/goog (GOOG 457.40, +4.39, +0.97%) Gmail for several hours, and the company's Apps Status page registered an outage for the service without offering further explanation.

A message posted on a company Web site at 2:37 p.m. Pacific time said Google had fixed the issue, "and Gmail should be back up and running as usual."

"We're still investigating the root cause of this outage," Google engineering director David Besbris wrote in the message.

Gmail last suffered a significant outage in February, when Google blamed a "routine maintenance event" that caused one of the company's European data centers to become overloaded.

The disruptions highlight risks inherent in the so-called "cloud computing" model of hosting services for businesses on the Internet, rather than installing them on-site in computers. Google is seen as a pioneer in cloud computing services.

In addition to being a free consumer service, Gmail is an important element in Google's Apps suite, which the company sells to agencies and businesses on a subscription basis.

A Google spokesman wasn't immediately available to comment.

John Letzing is a MarketWatch reporter based in San Francisco.