Search engine giant Google has confirmed that "a small subset of users" of Gmail have not been able to gain access to the email service, according to multiple media reports.

Gmail users were greeted with a "Temporary Error (500)" message today, making the service temporarily unavailable.

Calling the outage another Gmail, Twitter buzzed with complaints from all over the world, with some complaining that Google Apps too was down.

The Google Apps page confirmed with a red cross against Google Mail, that there was downtime on Friday.

The service is back up as of now.

Google India today announced that its ‘Internet Bus' will now be touring Karnataka on a campaign focusing on four themes - information, communication, entertainment and education.

Buoyed by the success of the project in Tamil Nadu, Google has launched the Internet Bus in Karnataka.

The Internet Bus rolled out from Kolar on Monday and is on an ambitious journey into Karnataka.

How to browse the net, search, e-mail, social networking, browse maps or track stock market trends - this is what global web-based search engine Google is going to teach people as its custom-built Internet bus drives through 15 towns of Karnataka to expose the people to the digital world.

The bus, which began its journey Monday, will course through the state for the next 50 days.

Google has also created platforms like the 'Be NetSmart' campaign to educate students, parents and teachers on Internet safety.

After travelling through Karnataka towns, the Internet bus will drive into other states across the country for similar exposure over the ensuing months.

Yahoo will close Geocities, the free web hosting service it paid $4bn for 10 years ago.

Yahoo! said that it will close its GeoCities service that provides people a free online locale for home pages.

New accounts are no longer being accepted for GeoCities, according to a post on its Web site.

The service will be close sometime later this year, Yahoo said.

GeoCities, known for its gaudy design, was a cutting edge service in the late 1990s that was later overtaken by blogs and social networking sites like MySpace.

After buying GeoCities, Yahoo failed to make significant upgrades to the site, although it still had 12 million unique visitors in March, according to comScore.

Yahoo has promised to release more details about the Geocities date of closure and how users can save their site data soon.