For all those frustrated by the inability to access their Gmail accounts on Monday, Google has a message: ''We feel your pain, and we're sorry''. At least that is what the official blog posting acknowledging the trouble was titled.

Google issued an apology to Gmail users who just experienced outages on the free e-mail application. The problem first began around 2 pm US Pacific time on Monday, leaving users mostly from the US, India and Canada without access to e-mail.

Google attributed the problem to issues with loading contacts in the Webmail service and apologized in a post on the official Gmail Blog. "The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly," the Google team wrote.

"We don't usually post about problems like this on our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted," noted Todd Jackson, Gmail product manager.

"We heard loud and clear today how much people care about their Gmail accounts. We followed all the e-mails to our support team and user group, we fielded phone calls from Google Apps customers and friends, and we saw the many Twitter posts. (We also heard from plenty of Googlers, who use Gmail for company e-mail.) We never take for granted the commitment we've made to running an e-mail service that you can count on," according to the Gmail blog.

The post went on to add - ''We've identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that affect Gmail and our other services, we're conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly.''

The Gmail problems follow Google Docs and Spreadsheets access problems in July when customers were locked out of their cloud-based applications for over an hour.

Gmail is a free Web-based email (webmail), POP3 and IMAP e-mail service provided by Google. On 1 April 2004 the product began as an invitation-only beta release. On 7 February 2007 the beta version was opened to the general public. With an initial storage capacity of 1 GB, it drastically increased the standard for free storage.

Gmail currently offers over 7000 MB of free storage (increasing approximately 3.348 MB daily), with additional storage ranging from 10 GB to 400 GB available for $20 to $500 per year. It has a search-oriented interface and a "conversation view" similar to an internet forum. Gmail is well-known for its use of the Ajax programming technique in its design, and has tens of millions of users.