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

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…

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.

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8 responses to “Lesson learned: Relying on one of anything is bad (Gmail Down)”

  1. Johann Buch Avatar
    Johann Buch

    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 …

    Reply
  2. Brad Grier Avatar
    Brad Grier

    @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.

    Reply
  3. TigerTom Avatar
    TigerTom

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

    Reply
  4. bgrier Avatar
    bgrier

    @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 🙂

    Reply
  5. Personal Development Avatar
    Personal Development

    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

    Reply
  6. Brad Grier Avatar
    Brad Grier

    @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.…

    Reply
  7. Brad Grier Avatar
    Brad Grier

    And it seems that Gmail is down again. Maybe I did­n’t learn the les­son yet.

    Reply
  8. Brad Grier Avatar
    Brad Grier

    Some folk are hav­ing prob­lems with Gmail again. Google Apps for Domains are mostly work­ing, but vanilla Gmail seems to be down.

    Reply

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