Reinforcing the notion that August 2008 may be the month that the cloud went down, GMail (which had problems just last week) is apparently having problems again. Upon my attempt to send an email, the Gmail part of Google Apps responded with "Oops.... the system encountered a problem (#796)." Then, in the below screenshot, you can see the error message that I got when I attempted to access my Gmail through the Gmail link in Google Apps' navigation bar.

It's error 502 (as seen below).

Perhaps even more remarkable is (1) how a thread about the problem is already alive within Google's discussion groups and (2) how that thread has already been indexed by Google's search engine. I found it by Googling Gmail error #796 and, as can be seen from the thread, others are seeing both the 796 and the 502 error.

Related Mike Arrington (TechCrunch): Systemwide Gmail Outage