Google has experienced a ‘catastrophic global failure,’ according to Your Content’s server email provider who told us about the potential cyber terrorist attack.
“Starting at around 4:30PM New York (10:30PM Zurich), Gmail suffered a global outage,” ProtonMail—host of Your Content’s Swiss-based email server revealed.
“A catastrophic failure at Gmail is causing emails sent to Gmail to permanently fail and bounce back. The error message from Gmail is the following:550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist.
“This is a global issue, and it impacts all email providers trying to send email to Gmail, not just ProtonMail.
“Because Gmail is sending a permanent failure, our mail servers will not automatically retry sending these messages (this is standard practice at all email services for handling permanent failures).”
Our rep at ProtonMail added: “We are closely monitoring the situation. At this time, little can be done until Google fixes the problem. We recommend attempting to resend the messages to Gmail users when Google has fixed the problem.”
You can find the latest status from Google’s status page.
ProtonMail was founded in 2013 by scientists who met at CERN and were drawn together by a shared vision of a more secure and private Internet.
Since then, ProtonMail has evolved into a global effort to protect civil liberties and build a more secure Internet, with team members also hailing from Caltech, Harvard, ETH Zurich and many other research institutions, the company profile reads.
What’s more, ProtonMail is incorporated in Switzerland and all of their servers are located in Switzerland.
In turn, this means all news tips received by Your Content are protected by strict Swiss privacy laws, especially when using a ProtonMail to ProtonMail account.
ProtonMail uses end-to-end encryption and zero access encryption to secure emails.
This means even the company itself cannot decrypt and read your emails. As a result, your encrypted emails cannot be shared with third parties.
ProtonMail can be used on any device without software install. ProtonMail secure email accounts are fully compatible with other email providers. You can send and receive emails normally.
Find out more about ProtonMail here.
