Google's web based email service 'Gmail' suffered another high profile technical problem on Thursday as the users reported difficulty in accessing their contacts.

The social networking site Twitter was flooded as the users posted comments highlighting the situation, which has occurred second time in a month. 



A message appeared at the top of the Gmail page stated that "Gmail is temporarily unable to access your contacts. You may experience issues while this persists." Google provided details on the site of a workaround which it said would allow the users to tap into their email accounts.

Earlier this month, most Google email users were unable to access the service for more than an hour.

Google informed that the outage was due to some of its routers getting overloaded during a routine upgrade. On its official blog, Google stated the outage as a "big deal". Also on Tuesday, Google's news website experienced an outage for nearly two hours.

This disruption occurred just three weeks after an outage which left millions of users without the free web based email service for more than an hour and a half.

The company blamed server maintenance for the Gmail outage and apologized for the disruption which occurred on September 1. Google also suffered technical problems in May leaving millions of people unable to use popular services such as its main search page, as well as Gmail and Google News.

Google also experienced a breakdown of Gmail in February which had lasted for few hours