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

The benefits of cloud computing

[mlwmohawk]

Someone else deals with all the problems, right?

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[jellomizer]

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. The problem is just like flying on an airplane. You are statically safer flying an airplane then driving. However because you fate isn't in your control you feel more scared then if you could just drive there yourself. The same thing with SaaS models, you actually get better service however because you don't have the same amount of control you feel like it is riskier. But it isn't

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[an.echte.trilingue]

As somebody who admins google apps in a business environment, I can say, that is not what they have to offer. What they have to offer is up-time that is better than what internal solutions could ever possibly offer at a price an internal solution could not pray to beat. Is it 100%? Is it free? Nope, but neither is the exchange server in the basement. Do I control my data? Nope, but realistically the alternative would be to contract my data storage out to somebody else anyway.

Bill W. is probably taking heat because he sold google apps to his superiors as having 100% uptime with no disadvantages, which of course it does not.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[electrictroy]

That's no excuse. When I need a word processor, I need it NOW, not tomorrow. I do not want my software to be dependent upon anything except my Cl drive. No net connection required.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[mlwmohawk]

because you don't have the same amount of control you feel like it is riskier. But it isn't

I have a real problem with "cloud computing" and the lack of control is just once piece. With google, there is no assurance that *my* problem is being worked on. *My* problem will get handled in the order in which it was reported. (if at all) To me, MY problem is the most important problem.

The problem with "cloud" computing, and probably the biggest IMHO, is the importance of "you" and your interests to the company providing your service. Suppose that you build your own business on a company providing virtual machine services. All is going well, you are profitable, and poof!! they decide to drop the service because it isn't profitable for them. What if they see what you are doing and say "hey, that's a great business idea, how does he do that, lets look at the code." and so on.

I could go on, but there is a lot to be said about "building" your own business, and my rule of thumb is: "Committing to a single vendor lock-in, in the long run, will always be worse than doing it yourself."

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[Sancho]

Statistics aren't magical. It's entirely possible that a safe, conscientious driver is safer driving than flying (I haven't seen any statistics which break it down that way before.) There are a whole lot of considerations that need to go into a statistic like that for it to have any real meaning.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[xant]

I started out as a personal gmail user. I was very happy with it, even routing my work email through it, but when the question for our mid-sized business came up, "should we outsource our email to gmail?" I said no. I said let's do due diligence, there are other outsourced solutions, this is something we really ought to get right.

Our CEOs (we have two, yeah..) both tried it and liked it, so we went with it.

So I'm in the unique position of having argued to management that we shouldn't risk anything on Gmail, and us doing it anyway because management wanted it. And you know what? I was wrong. Gmail has been a great productivity booster for our business, it's saving us money on salaries, and the downtime is less than we experienced when we were half-assedly running it ourselves.

Plus, when shit does hit, I just smile, and nobody tries to blame me. :-) On the ~two occasions that we had any noticable gmail outage, our CEOs weren't the ones complaining. They have realized that email may be important, but we can still get work done while gmail is futzing around with it.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[MightyYar]

Take a step back for a moment... Your email is down for a day. So what? For most people, this is really no big deal. Especially if it only happens once in a blue moon.

Have you never experienced a local failure of any kind? You never had a day without a computer before? Your local net connection never went down? Never had a power failure?

I'm sure some guy on here has some worst-case, niche scenario where losing email for a day means the end of the world - but for most of us, it just means people who REALLY need us use a phone. If your email is so important, you need some kind of redundancy that a single provider is just not going to ever give you. You'd better have a hell of a data center with redundant connections through multiple providers.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[cailith1970]

The problem I think isn't the fact that there is down time, the problem is that when you're performing internal maintenance, you can choose the best time to do it by coordinating with everyone else in the organisation. When downtime is imposed with little or no warning externally (or simply just goes down "for maintenance"), that's when the online model comes unstuck and people get frustrated.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[wfeick]

If you paid a marginal fee. Then you are a paying customer, and your problem gets priority.

It's not actually that absolute. What is your priority relative to all the other customers who are competing with you for finite rexources? The reality is that more profitable customers may move through the customer support phone queue faster than you, and their issues may be addressed before yours.

Also, it's not uncommon, particularly after a company acquisition, for customers to be reassessed and prioritized according to profitability. Companies decide to cede whole markets to their competitors if they're not sufficiently profitable or they decide to go in a different market direction.

The customer is often not told they are no longer a priority, they just find their rates go up, the quality of their support goes down, their packets are routed through over subscribed network fabric, etc.

The company won't actually tell the customer to go away; they'll continue to accept money until the customer figures it out and goes away on their own.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[Firehed]

Yeah, that's usually what I was saying about email when the exchange server at my previous employer went down every third week or so. Or when some rodent chewed through the line that handled the VOIP. Or when some transformer down the street got plowed by some idiot driver causing sporadic access to the mains for half a day. Word processors in the cloud may not make a ton of sense right now, but email is fundamentally useless without every machine in the chain working properly.

You try running your software without a power connection and let me know how it goes for you. Laptop batteries don't last that long, and desktop UPSs even less so (assume that the generator, if present, can only keep the servers online indefinitely, not the whole building).

Gmail being down for a few hours is a minor inconvenience at worst. If your dirt cheap or free and completely awesome email being unavailable for two hours a year is causing you to lose business, then you seriously need to rethink your operations. You have a landline, a cell phone, and a fax (among others), and if those are all also out of commission then chances are you've got bigger problems. You know, that mushroom cloud hovering overhead.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[sribe]

It most certainly is riskier. If you own your computers & data, and your company goes out of business, you no longer need access to that data. If you SaaS provider goes out of business, you probably still need that data.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[DragonWriter]

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.

Looking at the same data in another (and for more relevant to any useful comparison) way (and assuming it is completely accurate), the chance of dying per mile in a plane is a small fraction of that in a car. Rarely does anyone face a decision of the form, "Given that I need to spend N hours traveling, should I take a car, bus, train, or airplane." Rather, they are more likely to decide "Given taht I want to get from Point A to Point B, should I take a car, etc." So, really, the risk of death per hour of travel is pretty much irrelevant.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[Bryansix]

That gmail-lite project appears dead. That or they just forgot about the blog since 2005.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[Tony Hoyle]

Been using mine all day with no problems.. clearly the outage didn't affect everyone.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[Mista2]

Then think carefully about this before you rely on the cloud. Sometimes it's sunny and there is no cloud 8)

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not want my software to be dependent upon anything except my C: drive. No net connection required.

Different strokes. If you were traveling to see a client and your laptop got stolen, you might see the upside of having your documents online. Viewable and editable whether on a free library terminal or iPod Touch.

I can't count the number of times myself and co-workers have mislaid a USB thumb drive. Can I just VPN in? No, that's why I have the damn thumb drive.

And I use Photoshop, so there's no promise that my client will have a spare terminal in their office with the latest version installed. I guess that's why Adobe is shooting for online apps too.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[Anonymous Coward]

email is fundamentally useless without every machine in the chain working properly.

Ummm, no. SMTP was designed a long time ago when computers & networks were much less reliable than they are now. You can have multiple email servers on multiple internet providers on multiple backbones for outstanding reliability and graceful failover.

Of course, you do have to configure the redundancy - it doesn't magically appear.

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[pherthyl]

Uhh.. No. Drive from Vancouver to Halifax, you're in the car for a few days. Fly that distance and it's a few hours.

Risk/hour is completely irrelevant when comparing the safety of airplanes to cars. When was the last time you took a week long plane trip?

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[Bandman]

You've got to love IT, where one-in-a-million events occur every other day...

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[zooblethorpe]

Re-read the parent post. What businesses hate isn't customers, it's unprofitable customers. You know, the ones that cost more to provide services to than they bring in in terms of revenue.

Cheers,

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[MightyYar]

They should pay for the lapse in service, and that is fair. I was just saying that - in a business sense - losing a day of email connectivity is not the end of the world for most businesses. I mean, just this year I can think of a Sprint outage and at least one "Exchange is down for emergency maintenance" message. Last year there was a power outage and the generators didn't kick in. Every year there are snow days. Business moves on...

Re:The benefits of cloud computing

[TimSSG]

There is an SLA for paying customers, but with Google's track record they really need to up the penalties for non-compliance.

For some reason, I think Google are more likely to lower the penalties because of this than raise them. Tim S

Outage Outrage

[Pantero Blanco]

It's a risk you take any time you let someone else handle something for you.

Re:Outage Outrage

[mshannon78660]

It's a risk you take any time you let someone else handle something for you.

Specifically, it's a risk you take anytime you use a free service for something critical. You can't have an enforceable service level agreement for a free service - in order to be binding, a contract has to involve consideration from both sides.

Re:Outage Outrage

[Medievalist]

It's a risk you take any time you let someone else handle something for you.

Specifically, it's a risk you take anytime you use a free service for something critical. You can't have an enforceable service level agreement for a free service - in order to be binding, a contract has to involve consideration from both sides.

Having an "enforceable service level agreement" does not make things magically unbreakable.

One of the great business fallacies of our time...

A really smart provider will not sign a contract promising 100% uptime, but a stupid one will. Which one will deliver the better service? In practice, your real guarantee of reliability is quality work, and the best way to get quality work is hire the best and treat them well. Making them sign pieces of paper promising doom for failure does little or nothing useful.

I've been using Gmail all day, incidentally. Works fine for me - I've been corresponding with other gmail users no problem.

If you need something done right do it yourself!

[EncryptedSoldier]

You can't count on Google to run your IT...sorry buddy. Using Google may be cost effective, but the obvious trade off is that someone else is really doing your job, and if that person drops the ball, then you really screwed the pooch, at least that's what your boss will think.

Re:Better check your backups...

[EncryptedSoldier]

lmao yeah really...i know google gives all the excuses in the world as to why they still consider it a beta, but c'mon. It's just an excuse so when shit like this happens they can point their fingers at the subscript and say "well it's beta"!

These guys need a brain transplant...

[Khyber]

"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"

Run your own damned mail server if it's THAT IMPORTANT. Seriously, it's not hard to set one up, and you've obviously got the money to do it.

Once again, it's a case of rich people with more money than brains having the problems. Nothing important here, nothing of value lost.

Re:These guys need a brain transplant...

[Rary]

Run your own damned mail server if it's THAT IMPORTANT. Seriously, it's not hard to set one up, and you've obviously got the money to do it.

Right. Because some nerdy 20-something admin with a copy of "Sendmail for Dummies" can do a much better job than all the engineers at Google.

This is a paid service offered by one of the largest and most knowledgeable technology companies around. They should be able to do a much better job than any internal IT department. There are arguments in favour of doing it yourself, but there are definitely arguments in favour of outsourcing to a competent provider, which Google should be.

This is a PR disaster for Google.

Re:These guys need a brain transplant...

[iamhigh]

Who is running a single mail server that should be easily recoverable in a few hours? Who is running a service used my millions with complications I probably can't even fathom?

They might be "better" at running world class stuff than you, but you can be better at running simple stuff. Veritas, Acronis, etc... take your pick and you are back up and running. That probably isn't true for Google.

Re:These guys need a brain transplant...

[slimjim8094]

Right. Because some nerdy 20-something admin with a copy of "Sendmail for Dummies" can do a much better job than all the engineers at Google.

Well, actually, there's a decent chance. These technologies are extremely mature, and pretty simple. For example, I ran a 25-user email server for well over two years with a 99.8% uptime... between age 15 and 17, and it handled at least 500 emails a day.

The difference is, I was dealing with tens of gigabytes of data and backing that up (external HD + gpg + rsync + my house's firesafe). Google is dealing with thousands of terabytes (including, frankly, a couple of mine - I use their free domain service)

I'm sure as hell not as smart, and I'm NOT criticizing Google here. But when you're dealing with MUCH less data and don't need any load-balancing or fancy DNS tricks, it's pretty easy to get right.

But they are doing load balancing, clustering, immediate failover with synchronization, and all those other fancy tricks, because they need more than one server, have a lot of data to back up, and need to keep it all in sync. That is Fucking Hard to get right. A server in my client's basement on a T1 realistically only needs to worry about fire and trees.

Re:These guys need a brain transplant...

[mortonda]

Run your own damned mail server if it's THAT IMPORTANT. Seriously, it's not hard to set one up,

Yes and no, unfortunately. Sure it seems easy to set up a mail server, but there are a lot of misconfigured mail servers out there that are open relays, or spew backscatter spam, or simply get hacked and turned into zombies for spammers.

That doesn't begin to touch the issues of administration of users, anti spam software, uptime and redundancy planning, etc.

I'd say, it's not that hard *for a competent system admin* to set up a mail server.

That's SaaS for you...

[scsirob]

This is the main reason not to turn to Software as a Service. Sure, it's nice to just rent some functionality, but you are not in control of your own destiny. What if Google decides that GMail no longer fits their business model? Poof...

Re:That's SaaS for you...

[tshak]

If you ran your mail server off a single $499 dell workstation you'd probably have availability problems as well. This is not a problem inherent with SaaS, it's a problem with using a consumer grade mail service for a corporate mail.

Re:That's SaaS for you...

[Todd Knarr]

Actually they did have an SLA. The users complaining were using Google Apps, for which they pay and which includes a Service Level Agreement. However, the users are learning 2 important life lessons:

1. Down is down, SLA nonwithstanding. All the SLA means is that you may get limited compensation when the service is down. It doesn't get your service up and running one second sooner.
2. In this case, the compensation is pretty poor. Google won't compensate for damage to their businesses due to e-mail being down. All Google has to do is provide 15 more days service at the end of the contract period. But then, what did you expect for $50/year?

Re:If you need something done right do it yourself

[whisper_jeff]

The thing is someone will always drop the ball. In this case, the CEO can't chew out the guy in IT who pooched the email server and is working frantically trying to get it back up and running because that guy works for a different company. Or do people honestly think that an internally-run email server never has problems?... Just because it's Google does not mean it's infallible.

it can go both ways

[Trepidity]

I've been at plenty of places that run their own mailservers where uptime is considerably worse than Gmail's, so it'd be an improvement to offload it. The biggest problem seems to be at medium-sized shops: big enough for there to be problems, but not so big that you have some sort of massively redundant setup with transparent failover and 24/7 staffing. The ideal of the cloud-computing style of outsourcing is that you'd outsource to someone who was big enough to have a massively redundant setup with transparent failover and 24/7 staffing. However Google seems not to have delivered on that ideal.

Re:If you need something done right do it yourself

[samkass]

So you think most companies have better IT departments than Google? I agree that using a free beta software to run mission-critical software is probably unwise, but there are other providers that offer way more uptime than probably most internal IT departments could manage. Pair Networks, etc. It will cost money, though.

der

[Anonymous Coward]

That's some smart CEO, using an unsecured gmail account for his executive correspondence. I wish the article had mentioned the company so I could sell all of my shares immediately..

Re:If you need something done right do it yourself

[LWATCDR]

Because every company can afford redundant internet connections, back up generators, a fall over mail server, and a 24/7 IT staff and I don't mean some poor guy with a cell phone and no life.

Re:If you need something done right do it yourself

[snspdaarf]

The thing is, if I am going to take a screamin' reamin' from the boss, I prefer it be for something that is either my fault or that I can do something about. While a normal human can grasp these issues, some admin-types seem to think that if they throw a big enough shit hemorrhage that it will force the IT people to fix the problem. Tough to do when it is outside of their control.

Re:If you need something done right do it yourself

[ajs]

You can't count on the USPS to deliver your mail...sorry buddy.

You can't count on Verizon to run your telecommunications...sorry buddy.

Every service you use was, at one point, decentralized and every large corporation ran it themselves. Then someone did a better job and companies slowly released the reins. Does Verizon's phone service go down? Yep. Does the USPS lose mail? Yep. Goes Google mail go down? Yep. But, in the end we've decided that we'd rather rely on these external services than continue to try to run increasingly large services with ever-diminishing returns for the individual business.

Re:If you need something done right do it yourself

[ajs]

Interestingly, phone service and physical mail have both gone through several iterations of increasing and decreasing scope and centralization within organizations, so my above examples are a bit simplistic, but overall I think they hold up. We're at the start of what will be a century-plus period of understanding the role of computer-based communications in the business world, and as that grows and changes, Google will continue to grow and change and others will compete with them in interesting and perhaps successful ways.

I'm not waving a Google flag, here, just reacting to the idea that a single outage makes for a useless corporate service (which, if true, would have every company in the world running their own fleet of planes and drilling for their own oil).

Re:Can anyone tell me the difference...

[Todd Knarr]

The big difference is the affected company can do something about the problem. The CEO can come down and tell the admin he's not going home until this is fixed. They can call in any extra people they need. They can, if it's really that critical, have someone physically go and buy a new server and get enough software installed on it to get mail back up and running until the main system can be fixed. Expensive proposition there, but the company gets the option of deciding whether it's worth it or not.

Compare this to the situation Bill W.'s company is in. Their e-mail is down. All they can do is wait until it comes back up. No matter how crucial service is, no matter how much money they're losing because it's down, they've got absolutely no control over how fast the problem gets fixed. That'll be determined by how important to Google restoring service is. And the cost equation to Google is the cost of having staff working overtime all night to fix the problem vs. the cost of giving Bill W.'s company 15 days more service (about $2.06 at the $50/year rate for Google Apps).

SLAs aren't a cure-all

[Knara]

Yeah, okay, you get an SLA by paying for the business version, but anyone doing their homework and a few thought experiments will realize that SLAs are only potentially helpful after the fact.

$50/yr/user isn't going to get you 100% uptime, I don't care who is running it.

This strikes me kinda similar to the folks who try to run their businesses off Dreamhost shared web hosting servers (which don't even HAVE SLAs) and go ballistic when something breaks.

Re:Stallman is laughing

[That's Unpossible!]

No, it's the sound of one hand clapping.

What I mean to say is, what admin HASN'T had an outage like this?

Shit happens. I'd rather get email that works 99% of the time, and when there's a problem, google engineers are dealing with it, leaving me time to work on more important things.

Still more reliable than Exchange

[DustoneGT]

I'll gladly put up with the occasional outage...it's better than the almost weekly MS Exchange bugs on a crappy MS Windows Server system.

Re:Beta?

[Tony Hoyle]

You're paying less than $1 a week per user. If email was important to you you'd be paying a *lot* more than that. Stop being a cheapskate.
 

Re:Google's stuff is breaking all over

[mollymoo]

I also get the impression nobody at Google can be bothered with the boring stuff. It's not a staffing problem, it's a management problem. Google is famous for its lack of management and it's starting to show in the quality of their products.