It happened to me only once and the problem lasted for about 2 minutes.

However I've seen many cases on the Internet where people didn't have access to their account for 7+ days. That is a very big problem, especially if the Gmail account is your primary mail account.

If you get the "Disabled account" or "Locked out" message you can get help here

https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=53897

and here

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=61805

Yahoo just reached a deal with Google and seems no longer interested in any Microsoft offer (not even for a separate acquisition of their search technology).

This new deal didn't help the Yahoo shares to grow but it is expected that the company will win about $800 mil a year from displaying Google Ads in their network.

Still, Google or Yahoo can break the deal by paying the other $250 mil. This still leaves place for a Microsoft intervention.


Google blog:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/our-agreement-to-provide-ad-technology.html

Yahoo blog:
http://ycorpblog.com/2008/06/12/our-google-deal/