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?"

Comments

Re:You get what you pay for!

[AKAImBatman]

Doesn't anyone RTFA?

Google Apps is a suite of hosted collaboration and communication software and services designed for workplace use. Its Premier edition costs US$50 per user per year and includes a 99.9% uptime guarantee for the Gmail service.

In August, Gmail had three significant outages that affected not only individual consumers of the free Webmail service but also paying Google Apps Premier customers. As a result, Google decided to extend a credit to all Apps Premier customers and vowed to improve its problem-notification methods.

$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.

There is an SLA for paying customers

[Que_Ball]

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.

Google SLA

[WPIDalamar]

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

Re:Outage Outrage

[jeffmeden]

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.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[tolan-b]

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.