If you have Gmail or are trying to email someone who has it...

Starting at around 4:30PM ET, Gmail suffered a global outage.

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.  

Because Gmail is sending a permanent failure, other mail servers will not automatically retry sending these messages (this is standard practice at all email services for handling permanent failures).  

At this time, little can be done until Google fixes the problem. You can attempt to resend the messages to Gmail users when Google has fixed the problem. You can find the latest status from Google's status page:  

https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=1&iid=a8b67908fadee664c68c240ff9f529ab

I had several gmails bounce back with the same message.

I would think something more like a massive LDAP or Directory Services database crash that replicated to other servers making the email database unusable.

 
The attack on the government agencies has been going on a while and I think was more about getting info about vaccines and money related.  Of course perhaps Gmail also uses the software that was targeted so....

For gmail and other social media services.  We don't know right now how extensive the security breach is.

I never had gmail.  I still use my hotmail and yahoo from the previous millennium for personal use.  I do my hobbying with Protomail.

like ProtonMail (.ch) or Hushmail.

Hello, buddy use proton mail, Outlook, Yandex Mail.

A massive db crash replicating? I thought replication of db is precisely to preserve data if there is a crash on master replica, but what do I know. Lol.