Did the housekeeper unplug Gmail’s cables ?
“Dear Santa, I’d love to get my e-mails back. Could you please bring Gmail back up ?!”
That’s what millions of people have been secretly thinking this morning when they discovered with horror that gmail was not available.
It was matter of minutes before hundreds of messages were posted on Twitter with hashtags #gmail and #gfail. If your tried to open your emails, you should have encountered an error 502, although it still seems to work via IMAP and POP.
Google has just posted a status on their support page saying they are aware of the problem and they’re working on fixing it:
“We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a number of users. This problem occurred at approximately 1.30AM Pacific Time. We’re working hard to resolve this problem and will post updates as we have them. We apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused.”
But for few hours, noone managed to post any information to the users. There was no blog entry to give an update on the issue, not even through their Twitter account. Another disturbing fact is that when trying to reach the service, you just get an Error 502 page saying : Server Error. You guys couldn’t manage to have a hold-on page saying : « Google Mail is temporarily unavailable, we apologize for any inconvenience. We will keep you updated. »
Now, that’s the second major issue Google is facing in less than a month after years and years of unfailing services. Is this a lead to their diving in the abyss ? Is this related to the termination of their contracts with third parties who were in charge of managing many of these services ?
As long as this would only affect you for your personal use, you could still handle it, but what about all the professional users of Google services, including Google Apps. How do they manage this kind of prolonged outage. It would be rather interesting to rate the business dependance to gmail services.
Many web marketing agencies and most websites make use of AdSense, some of them are living from it. Google is also the most used search engine, so most SEO strategies will focus on how good you are ranked in Google. Now what if Google failed to bring the appropriate service. What’s your plan B ?
Update: Gmail is back at 2:25 PM CET.
Update 2: Acacio Cruz, from Google, has posted a blog entry on the outage.
1 Response to “Did the housekeeper unplug Gmail’s cables ?”
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