This Week’s Gmail Outage: It’s Only Email, Get Over It
This week Gmail went down and you would have thought the world stopped. The reaction all over the web was overwhelming, and Twitter became nearly useless if you wanted to hear about anything else. I mean, come on, it’s only email, not the end of the world. Now, hear me out before you start railing against what I’m saying.
My email is pure Gmail, so the outage affected me like all the other Gmail users. My email went down, stayed down for a while, and then came back up just like yours. Did I panic? No, I knew it would come back, and pretty soon at that. Did the lack of email kill off my productivity? Nope. I just worked on other things.
Let’s face it, email is hosted on servers, whether Google’s or someone else’s. And servers go down from time to time. It’s a fact of life — nothing runs forever. Sure we can jump up and down and scream at Google, but why? I knew Gmail would come back and sure enough it did.
I heard all kinds of complaints when Gmail went down. People saying that email service X would never go down like that. Or others saying that Google OWED us to keep Gmail up and running. Give me a break, stuff happens. When I was in the corporate world it was oh, so common to hear employees at some large company or another wandering down the halls claiming that “email is down again.” And this the fancy corporate Exchange Server that only has to keep their own employees working. Stuff happens.
I had my own hosted Exchange Server for a long time and while it rarely went down, sometimes it did. The fact is that email servers are on the web and sometimes access to the server (or the web) is cut off. Stuff happens and we just have to get over it.
As an IT guy who runs that stuff on the backend, AMEN!!!!
I feel for you guys who have to support the backend. You are the true heroes of the corporate world. Butt-kissing mode off.
I believe this is applicable here. It is amazing how soon people are owed something. Especially something as fantastic and free as Google’s services. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXStPqhLmIk
As far as I know, only the Web client went down. E-mail on my Palm Pre never missed a beat
On my desk I use Thunderbird (with Google Apps) and didn’t have a bit of trouble. In fact, I don’t remember their IMAP going down in a long time. Whenever there’s a “Gmail outage” it’s always the Web client.
Corporate mail servers, no matter what size company, go down far more often than Google, in my experience. And you really don’t want to be a small to mid-size company going into a three day holiday weekend. If those three IT guys all go to a company party and get smashed on Saturday your e-mail could be down until Tuesday.
I for one am very happy that Google is watching out for my e-mail this weekend.
Nice to hear a voice of reason.
Let’s face it, if your life or job is so utterly dependant on having continuous, uninterrupted email communication, you should either get antother job… or here’s a thought… a backup email account.
I have three… Work, Personal and a third for all my internet purchases etc. All three are from different providers and all three have gone down at least twice this year.
Such is the nature of the beast.
gmail’s offline mode would work pretty well in this situation too.
Hi James,
I reacted exactly the same way as you did and also thought most people bogging down twitter were, well, being twits
On the other hand, I suppose that outages like this one can be problematic, especially for big businesses – which google is busy trying to win over. Some people rely on responding very quickly to mails, and I can understand that they make a fuss.
Couldnt have said it better. If you even NOTICED the outage…you either:
A. have good timing, and probably should just go get a coffee or take a walk
or
B. Check email WAY too much.
Now if it was an internet outage…., now thats not funny!
It’s like the line from that Joni Mitchell song…
“Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you got
Till it’s gone…”
I know of mainframes that have never been down for more than 20 years. Not once. They have email and database running on them. Most mainframes have been fault tolerant since the seventies. Today’s modern mainframes are literally Self-Healing. PC Servers are still know as “Piece of Crap” servers to big iron junkies like me.
I agree. Nothing in the world of IT stays online forever. But the worse thing is explaining it to the naive users who think that since you work in IT, you have some kind of Mario World mushroom which you can use and solve all of the IT problems. Hey give us a break, we are already cash starved and we cant change the whole server every time it goes down. Life working in Helpless Desk…tsk tsk..
I can see it from both sides. I think if you’re paying for enterprise-level services from Google then you’ve a right to complain; the sheer number of tech-familiar people who use both Gmail and Twitter means you’re always going to see an overwhelming number of comments on the latter should the former go down.
On the other side, as you say James, there’s always something else you can be getting on with. The biggest frustration is not knowing what’s going on, and not knowing how long fixing it is likely to take. If people could retweet the Gmail team saying “server needs to restart; back up in 15″ or “huge fire caused death & devastation; take a break because email is hours away” then at least users would know what to expect. Whether you’re paying for the service or getting it free (and let’s face it, the “free” people are paying Google via their adverts) there’s some reasonable expectation that they’ll do their best to communicate with you. If you’re shouting more to promote the service than you are to support existing users then I’m naturally suspicious.
I thought the outcry was a little overboard. Twitter-ers were whining in the first five minutes. It was only out a couple of hours, not a couple of weeks.
And all I could think of was – you people have never worked for a large corporation (or the government) where outages are frequent.
Seems to me all the whiners need to find a life outside their email once in awhile.
The real big news concerning GMail is that it now requires (=collects) mobile phone numbers when you’re trying to register an account.
For spam protection purposes. Of course.
I get ALL my important NEWS from Twitter. They are so far ahead of the “regular news” it is really sad. I demand immediate notification that important events such as Gmail Is DOWN. Immediate means NOW not 5 minutes from now on CNN or some other slow news source. This is 2009 – No More Delays. BTW, when Gmail is down it IS front page news around the World – learn to Deal with it.
Misplaced confidence. Google Calendar has never come back, for instance. Items entered have been disappearing since at least October 2007 and Google has never fixed it in almost 2 years. Long time to wait.