Gmail went down for a brief moment today, and Yahoo decided to take advantage of problems that its biggest email competitor was having.
The outage, which was a temporary 500 code problem and appears to be over for most folks, affected millions of users from around the world.
Noticing the chatter about Gmail on social media channels, Yahoo thought it was a great time to share the information with its Twitter followers:
Thanks for the updates, Yahoo.
Meanwhile, Microsoft decided to chime in as well, albeit a little more cleverly:
According to Google’s App Status Dashboard, Gmail is currently having a “service disruption.” My Gmail looks to be working fine now, but some of my colleagues are still noticing some problems.
Gmail passed Hotmail — which was replaced by Outlook.com two years ago — in June 2012 to become the largest email service in the world. The last user count update from Google noted 425 million monthly active Gmail users.
Update, 1:50 P.M.
Yahoo just decided that the tweets were a little unnecessary and has apologized:
The company also reminded followers that its Twitter account is used “to inform about news and events.”
Also, we didn’t catch this at first, but the Washington Post notes that Yahoo tweeted four times in a row about Gmail’s outage before deleting most of the original posts.
