Slashdot Mirror
Extended Gmail Outage Frustrates Admins
CWmike writes "A prolonged, ongoing Gmail outage has some Google Apps administrators pulling their hair out as their end users, including high-ranking executives, complain loudly while they wait for service to be restored. At about 5 p.m. US Eastern on Wednesday, Google announced that the company was aware of the problem preventing Gmail users from logging into their accounts and that it expected to fix it by 9 p.m. on Thursday. Google offered no explanation of the problem or why it would take it so long to solve the problem, a '502' error when trying to access Gmail. Google said the bug is affecting 'a small number of users,' but that is little comfort for Google Apps administrators. Admin Bill W. posted a desperate message on the forum Thursday morning, saying his company's CEO is steaming about being locked out of his e-mail account since around 4 p.m. on Wednesday. It's not the first Gmail outage. So, will this one prompt calls for a service-level agreement for paying customers? And a more immediate question: Why no Gears for offline Gmail access at very least, Google?"
Doesn't anyone RTFA?
$50/yr for each user is not "free". Nor is it in the domain of "you get what you pay for". $50 per user is actually a rather significant sum when we're talking about 100+ user companies.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Quote from article: So, will this one prompt calls for a service-level agreement for paying customers?
Paying customers of the apps Premium account level DO have a service level agreement.
Free customers do not however which is probably what they were trying to say.
Revised quote: So, will this one prompt calls for a service-level agreement for free customers in addition to paying customers?
From the terms of service for Premier account edition:
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/premier_terms.html
1.9. *Service Level Agreement*, or *SLA* means the Service Level Agreement located at the following URL: http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/sla.html
Downtime period is a period of ten consecutive minutes of Downtime
Service Credit is
three days of service added to the end of your term at no charge for monthly uptime percentage between 99.0 and 99.9
seven days for between 99.0 and 95.0
fifteen days for worse than 95.0 uptime percentage.
You must request your service credit. It is not automatic.
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html
There you go, the SLA for Google Apps. It's listed at 99.9%
But... the remedies for them failing that suck, only up to 15 days worth of service per month will be credited.
Also, it costs $50 per user per year
That's just it, google DOES charge for the hosted apps version of Gmail. See http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html for more info.
Google Apps for Business
Claims right on that page that it provides 99.9% uptime.
If Google doubts it's readiness for mission-critical usage it gets a "beta" slapped on it. Do real professionals actually think Google Apps is ready for prime time usage?
Google Apps is a hosted service sold to businesses, Google are meant to provide that redundancy, and in theory they should be in a much better position to provide it than most small to medium size companies' IT departments.
In practice they seem to be sucking a bit.
Yes. In your organization how many times have your servers went down or had a problem... Compare that to Google Mail... You will probably find that there is a lot less downtime.
Sorry, but the total downtime I've ever caused ALL of my employers over my career has been a LOT less than 28 hours! Heck, even if you add up the downtime for all of the single systems I've admined their collective downtime is probably only close to that. I'm not bragging, I'm pointing out how bad of an outage this is. The only other outages I've personally heard of that were this bad are hosting providers who have critical systems physically damaged and a failed Exchange 2000 pilot at Cisco (They had a corrupted datastore that was so bad that MS and HP and EMC couldn't recover it so they had to fall back to a tape restore which took something similar to this gmail outage)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Yet amazingly enough planes crash. They crash quite often in fact. In fact from what I remember the chance to die per hour of travel is roughly the same between airplanes and cars. In other words the chance of dying from some random outside event is probably much higher in an airplane per hour of travel. So yes, a safe driver is much less likely to die in a car than in an airplane.