Turns out Nick Saber wasn't alone this week in losing access to his Google accounts. According to reports, an unknown number of users had trouble accessing Gmail and Google Apps. Many were prevented from getting into their accounts for up to 15 hours.The Google Discussion Group board for Google Apps is full of complaints from people who have been unable to get into their Gmail and Apps accounts. When attempting to log in, many are receiving a message that reads "502 Server Error". Google has offered few details, and says that only a small number of users have been affected.

Google Apps has more than 10 million users.

Just yesterday we heard the story of Nick Saber, who was denied access to his Google accounts for hours for no apparent reason. He was able to resolve his access issues after spending some time on the phone with Google support.There's no word on what Google is doing right now to fix the current problem.

Given that the problems are limited to a certain set of people, it is likely that it is affecting those people whose accounts are stored on the same server or set of servers.

Gmail went dark just last month for a little bit. This latest round of problems is another mark against Google and cloud computing.

Thankfully, I have not been affected. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to write this post.

Google just recently responded to media inquiries. According to GigaOM, Google said, "A small number of our users had difficulty accessing Gmail yesterday. Some Google Apps users were also affected. The problem is now resolved. We know how important Gmail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We encourage any organizations having technical difficulties to visit the Google Apps Help Center (http://www.google.com/support/a/ ) to contact the Google Apps support team."