More Gmail fail: Contact lists break, angering millions anew

On the heels of a recent massive outage that took down Gmail access globally for several hours, Google (GOOG) suffered another black eye, when the contacts-management portion of its Internet email program went down for several hours on Thursday. Millions of users (including me) were greeted with the message "contacts temporary unavailable" when they accessed their accounts. It remains unclear how widespread the outage is; Google has not issued any word on the nature or status of its problems, beyond an icon notification of problems in the Google Apps Status Dashboard.

Losing access to contacts also means losing access to the auto-complete feature of Gmail, which makes it all but impossible to send emails: no one memorizes many contacts' email addresses these days, precisely due to the prevalence and utility of auto-complete features.