Well it’s been just over a year since this post was written, and Google’s Gmail is down again in a most significant way. Looks like folks on Twitter are pretty vocal about it this time too! And it seems that this post is still relevant, sadly. I’ve re-opened the comments on this one as some of the stuff a year ago was interesting, maybe you can pass the Gmail outage by offering your thoughts.
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.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
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 . . .
@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.
Never rely on someone else’s storage.
Never rely on your own storage.
Always have a backup.
@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
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
@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….
And it seems that Gmail is down again. Maybe I didn’t learn the lesson yet.
Some folk are having problems with Gmail again. Google Apps for Domains are mostly working, but vanilla Gmail seems to be down.