BEIJING, Sept. 2 — Gmail, Google’s popular free e-mail service, failed for more than an hour Tuesday in many places, affecting a “majority” of its millions of email users.

The outage affected “a majority” of Gmail users, the company said, and lasted about an hour and 45 minutes until the problem was fixed.

Worldwide users appeared to be affected, with people from England, Italy, Singapore and South Africa reporting problems on the company’s support site.

The free version of Gmail is the world’s third most-popular email program with some 149 million users worldwide in June, ranking behind the free email services offered by Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc., according to data from comScore Inc.

The disruption came as Google attempts to compete with Microsoft Corp. and IBM to expand its service among business users, who are likely to be less tolerant of long outages. Gmail already competes with Microsoft’s Hotmail and Yahoo’s Web-based e-mail.

Though occasional disruptions are common, widespread outages involving Google’s services are rare.

This is the second outrage of Gmail this week after a small one on Monday that wiped out email to only a “small subset” of users. 

On Xinhua Web site: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2009-09/02/c_1339221.htm