One of our staff members out here has had some problem sending and receiving emails from his Gmail account. It turns out that Gmail is down for several people and they are having problems sending and receiving emails.
However, Google seems to be aware about the issue as the Apps Status Dashboard shows a "Service disruption" message for the Google Mail service. However, these is no indication as to which parts of the world the outage is affecting users.
Gmail has had a long run with problems where several users have been affected in the past too. If you are unable to access Gmail, you can always try out these tricks to access Gmail or check out some alternative modes to access Gmail.