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Google Mail Outage

February 24th, 2009 · by David Bradley >> 10 Comments

gmail-outageOnce again, there’s been an outage at Google, this time rather than labeling all sites as malware, it was GMail, the free web-based mail system from the internet behemoth that stopped providing personal and business users with its services. Is this Google playing with our emotions, withholding favors and giving us a taste of what things will be like when it’s gone? Perhaps.

The system seems to be back online now. GMail and Google Docs were affected although Google Reader and Google Calendar stayed up all the while, it seems. Official explanation is here although Digital Inspiration thinks it may have been a denial-of-service attack.

There’s a lesson to be learned here, though, especially for businesses that rely on Google’s systems for their day to day operations – don’t!

If you’re relying on a single company like Google, with no contingency or backup for your email, then you could lose out should there ever be a longer-standing fail than today’s GMail outage.

While the outage seemed to be short-lived, some bloggers and twitter users are still reporting problems with mobile access.

10 responses so far ↓

  • David Bradley // Feb 24, 2009 at 5:01 am

    Google Mail Outage: Once again, there’s been an outage at Google, this time rather than labeling all sites.. http://bit.ly/B48xj

  • David Bradley // Feb 24, 2009 at 5:01 am

    Google Mail Outage: Once again, there’s been an outage at Google, this time rather than labeling all sites.. http://bit.ly/B48xj

  • Carl Grint // Feb 24, 2009 at 12:19 pm

    I use GMail for business, and whilst I am unable to log into the GMail website, POP is working perfectly fine for me.
    This is the first problem I can recall in 5 years of using GMail, and in all honestly, that is far superior to the hosted email providers I have used for my business.

    I use GMail as it provides a great storage solution for all of my emails, in addition to my computers versions.

    As with the previous problem at Google, because the company is so big and seen as all things to all men, when they do trip up, it is reported as the end of the world, the end of cloud computing etc etc.

    If anyone can show me another email provider who has only had one system problem in five years, then I would gladly sign up with them today.

  • David Bradley // Feb 24, 2009 at 12:24 pm

    @bigcam01 tweeted me to say that Yahoo services on BT connections are flaky at the moment too.

  • David Bradley // Feb 24, 2009 at 2:58 pm

    Good riposte Carl. I don’t anticipate Google will go belly up any time soon, but I just think people should be aware that they oughtn’t to rely be 100% reliant on a single external company for their business.

  • Carl Grint // Feb 24, 2009 at 3:55 pm

    David,
    you make a very valid point, one a client of mine found out to their cost recently when a server failed with no backup solution, which cost their website £10,000’s in sales, whilst the site was moved to another server.

    We all need to ensure we are not reliant on a single supply, whether that is with a single company or a single piece of hardware.

    Some people have become ‘comfortable’ with Google, and believe they will never let them down, these (small) problems should be a wake up call, there needs to be redundancy in business.

    I think a lot of times it comes down to cost, but when you view the cost of resolving issue’s such as lost email for X hours or a server which dies those costs pale in comparison.
    It just can be difficult to take those steps when everything seems to be running fine.

  • Sally Church // Feb 24, 2009 at 4:19 pm

    Actually, Gmail was still working fine on my iPhone and from POP mail so it was clearly only the web browser that was the problem.

    That’s the neat thing with POP and IMAP though; if one service goes down you can still POP a service through alternatives such as Thunderbird, Eudora or Mac Mail and stay up and running.

  • David Bradley // Feb 24, 2009 at 4:40 pm

    Actually, now that you mention it. I’d been downloading via POP3 happily all morning and it was only when someone mentioned an issue on twitter that I investigated and discovered I couldn’t grab mail via the web. GReader and Calendar were working fine all the while…

  • David Bradley // Feb 24, 2009 at 9:06 pm

    Google apologizes for GMail outage but no explanation – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/update-on-gmail.html

  • David Bradley // Feb 26, 2009 at 8:08 am

    Check on the current status of all Google Apps

    http://www.google.com/appsstatus#

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