Lesson learned: Relying on one of anything is bad (Gmail Down)

by Brad Grier on August 11, 2008

in Blogging, In the life, News, Social Media

The online world was in a tizzy this afternoon as Google’s Gmail application crashed and burned.

Gmail and Google Apps for domains all seem impacted.

This is a breaking event so I’ll update this post when more is known. Gmail’s Blog has nothing on it, currently.

*** UPDATE ***
It looks like the big brains at Gmail have fixed the issue.

The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly. Everything should be back to normal by the time you read this.

And indeed it does seem to be back to normal. Excellent.


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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Johann Buch 08.12.08 at 12:32 am

I had the same problem here in Germany. It was quite frustrating. I also noticed some problems with adwords just a few minutes ago. It seems google is experiencing some kinks . . .

2 Brad Grier 08.12.08 at 7:36 am

@Johann Buch - Thanks for the note…

It seems that it did affect various places around the globe, but not consistently. Weird that.

On another note, my email at work is also screwed right now. Must be something on the interwebs.

3 TigerTom 08.20.08 at 12:18 pm

Never rely on someone else’s storage.
Never rely on your own storage.
Always have a backup.

4 bgrier 08.20.08 at 12:38 pm

@TigerTom - Actually, I tend to believe that you can rely on your own storage solutions, as long as you have made arrangements for external backup, etc. Redundancy is best. I’ve written before about Mozy online backup :)
But this was related to email moreso than storage :)

5 Personal Development 09.04.08 at 5:29 am

I remember one update I did for a major bank in the UK about 8 years ago (well before my current self-employment) and I brought down their entire system because I forced an overnight program to divide by 0 (obviously none of this was intentional and I was employed by them at the time!). They lost about £400,000 that next day because we couldn’t quickly work out what the problem was! To be fair, they were very nice about it and my boss took some of the responsibility as he and another team of people had looked over my code before we put it live!

Sometimes a tiny weeny mistake can cause major problems!! I imagine though that if several million people are affected, it can cause one or two complaints!

Personal Developments last blog post..Mind Your Language

6 Brad Grier 09.04.08 at 7:45 am

@Personal Development - Wow, so did you revert to backup whilst you were solving the problem? Switch to a redundant system?

And yeah, by now I’m hoping that Google has better redundancy plans in place.

Now about this ‘chrome’ thing….

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