Gmail has been going through a lot of problems lately, and we can add one more to that list. This time, it’s not an outage as such but the problem is with loading the contacts. Gmail "is temporarily unable to access your contacts. You may experience issues while this persists” is the error that is being displayed and clicking on the ‘Learn More’ link takes the user to the 'Contacts temporarily unavailable’ page.

This is the second time in a month that Gmail’s service has been disrupted. The reason for the September 1 outage was described as an overload during their ‘Server Maintenance’.

This does not augur well for Google which has got millions of people depending on its Gmail service. It’ll only make people revert back to their earlier e-mail service providers like Yahoo! Mail or Windows Live Mail.

We are still waiting for the contacts to show up and Google to release an official confirmation as to what is causing this problem.

In the meantime, you can read this article on How to backup your Gmail mails.

update: contacts are back, everything seems normal as of now