I mean come on, you are the colossus of companies with an infrastructure that is so large, it’s even hard for most Geeks to even imagine. This was a cluster “expletive here”.
According to Google – Their Gmail service was offline due to a maintenance miscalculation for the glitch and engineers took some servers offline, it says, and inadvertently overloaded other servers as a result.
I think at minimum, they should know what load balancing is and what is needed to take on the millions of emails that go through the Gmail servers each day. This is not rocket science, its Technology 101 and they failed the first course.
This is not the first time an outage has occurred with Gmail and I am sure it will not be the last. These mistakes should never happen if you practice change control correctly.
I am glad I do not use Gmail for my business or I would be (SOL). The outage lasted for about one hour and 40 minutes. I can tell you first hand that many users are outraged and I am sure many will look elsewhere for another email solution. I am one of those people.
Google claims 99.9 percent uptime, but lately they missed this mark.
According to PCWorld – Gmail seems to have suffered more than its fair share of outages lately. In May, a traffic routing error knocked the service offline for users across the globe, earning the hashtag “#googlefail” on Twitter. That crash came within weeks of several smaller outages, one just days earlier in May, another in mid-April, and another — this one lasting as long as 36 hours for some people — in March.
Let’s see how long before the next outage.
I was in the middle of my work day when this happened expecting an important correspondence. I was pulling out my hair out with frustration!
.-= A. Zuck´s last blog ..Jason, Where Have You Been? =-.
It’s scary how people can’t live without their emails for 2 hours nowadays :D (or internet, if that matters)
.-= Michael Aulia´s last blog ..August 2009 Traffic & Income Statistics =-.
Michael,
It’s a different world now.
I agree with the author – such downtimes of services are unacceptable for such a huge provider as G… It was in the middle of my working day when I had to face the trouble.
2Michael: I don’t think it’s really scary – it’s just the evolution… For example, I work for a mobile application development company, and our business wouldn’t exist without the evolution of communication.
The technology has improved a lot. People are suffering a lot if internet does not work for two hours. Things has to be changed. I also suffered due to Gmail.
It was very strange! During that time, I was unable to log into GMail, of course, but an email did get forwarded from Gmail to my Yahoo mail account (I keep it permanently forwarded since the Yahoo mail account is the old one where everything goes). I also got into Google Analytics, and the text was there, but the charts were just red X’s. #GoogleFail!
.-= christie´s last blog ..Google Wave Sandbox – I have a login! =-.