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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?"
Why no Gears for offline Gmail access at very least, Google?
I believe it's called POP/IMAP access, and it's been around a long time. Oh, downside - you might need a program called Outlook/Express or Thunderbird. Free download available.
Evolution is a state-sponsored, state-protected religion.
Outsourcing links in your essential service chains is risky enough. Outsourcing them to a single point of failure is too risky. So many independent places all outsourcing something so central to so many service chains is unacceptably risky.
I would never rely on GMail without a local cache of all the content GMail holds, or without a truly alternate server to serve my messages when GMail goes down, as it clearly does some percentage of the time.
--
make install -not war
Have you really looked at it? I mean actually go to the Google Apps page at looked at it, or did you just hit reply without knowing. Oh, who am I kidding, this is /. and I'm lucky you read any of my message.
Seriously, here's a link to the Google Apps business page. Look around. This isn't free stuff. I'm not sure why you scoff at this and not other business webmail applications. There...do you see that...do you see how Gmail isn't always free?
My point remains...if they paid for it, Google owes them an explanation.
With google, there is no assurance that *my* problem is being worked on.
While that is true, it is also true of your electricity and net connection. And any other utilities feeding your building that are critical to your business.
For most businesses, losing email for a little while is nothing compared to a snow day. It just means more telephone calls. And probably more productivity :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Honestly, I've maintained my own mail server for 5 years, and my company's corporate server for 2 years, and I can count on one hand the number of times either of them have failed in that period. When they did fail (because I was being irresponsible about configuration changes, or hardware failures, etc), there was pretty much no way I was going to be getting in bed before I got them back up.
Granted, I don't have millions of users and petabytes of email. But I also am not any kind of real system administrator, I don't have a massive redundant data storage facility, and neither do I have millions of dollars and endlessly brilliant engineers working at my beck and call.
Some GMail downtime is, of course, to be expected. But these kind of high-profile outages from Amazon and Google are truly shocking. I don't think it puts the nail in the coffin of SaaS by any means, but it does indicate a significant necessity of SLAs for paying customers.
I would desperately love to divest myself of the responsibility for these mail servers, but I want to know that I can trust GMail's response time during crisis as much as I can trust my own.
have you been seen on slash?
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.
Bullshit- this is an often-repeated myth that small or medium-sized IT shops can't offer competitive uptimes. It's simply not true- I'm a sole sysadmin, and my server (~200 users) has only had one time when we had an outage , and it took us all of about 15 minutes to fix. We have a number of people who choose to use GMail, and I'm constantly reminding them that they should not be relying on Gmail so much.
The problem is not downtime- it's lack of any way to mitigate the problems, and a complete and total lack of any customer service from Google. There is NOBODY you can call when there's a problem. PERIOD.
Compare and contrast. Google:
Me:
The building I (and the server) are in in could burn to the ground, and I could have us back up in less time than this stupid outage at Google (I'm factoring the time to find/buy two commodity PCs, find/buy compatible tape drive/SCSI card, do an OS install, install the backup server, and fetch the off-site backups from across campus.)
If Google's datacenter burns to the ground, how long do you think you'll be without your GMail account?
Please help metamoderate.
I wonder how much rackspace is racking in having their mailtrust ad slapped on top of this story.
People keep claiming that Google has better uptime than in house systems. I have to ask, what kind of monkeys are administering these systems? In the last decade, we have not had a single unscheduled email server outage. We haven't even come close to 28 hours of SCHEDULED downtime. Heck, my personal mail server hasn't come close to 28 hours of unscheduled downtime in the last decade. There just isn't that much that can go wrong on an even half assed administered email server. I get why it would take longer for Google to restore their backups, but that is just a weakness of centralized data storage. It's everybody trying to get a restore at the same time so they have to stand in line. That is just one reason that gmail is only good for personal email.
The worst thing is the update to iGoogle (which is extensive and undoubtedly the cause of the outage) is quite a step backwards. It's a pretty clunky hybrid of a window based system and a widget based system, with a lot more AJAX and a lot fewer clickable links.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Let's see, so 99.9% uptime...
Hours in a year: 8760
99.9% of hours in year: 8751.24
Hours in a year that Google has lost in this incident: >27 or 99.691780821917808219178082191781%. Lets round to 99.692% (I'm feeling charitable.)
Wait, we just said 99.9% uptime. Really we meant 99.9% uptime every ten years.
So, 99.9% of 87,600 hours allows us 87.6 hours out of service. No problem boys, we've got two weeks to get this thing working!
Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability: without Availability the other two are assured, as is Bankruptcy.
C. Other.
The online copies are backups. When your laptop went AWOL, you go to some new computer, download them, then do your thing.
Go redundant. When your laptop isn't available, these new phones can sometimes process your actual documents. We're one generation short of proper usability on this front. That will be fixed in about 2 years.
Phone not an option? Get a "disposable desktop". You know, some piece of junk for $100. There's a huge influx of machines due to hit this maturity stage within the same next two years when HeavyOS drives upgrades.
My USB drive is my watch. It's strapped to my arm. So unless I'm a twit and take it off, it's essentially unloseable. Oh look, I lost it. Here's one on my car key chain. Awww, I got mugged. Maybe in 10 years they'll be doing subcutaneous mods. (Gee. My beer belly holds 4 terabytes.)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
That's what they get for not having an SLA.
In today's bastardized world, if you don't have something in writing, you have absolutely nothing.
If a small fry were to screw up this bad, they would be afraid of their phone thanks to the many passive-aggressive office drones complaining repeatedly. Not that it helps in any way, but I'm pretty sure Google's techs aren't being harassed with phone calls every 5 seconds. I hate to enable the lusers, but when you've got paying clients breathing down your neck, you tend to take whatever measures necessary to fix the problem asap.
If anything, this should send the message that Google, contrary to popular belief, is not invincible. They mess up just like everyone else, which means maybe they're no better than anyone else.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The worst thing is the update to iGoogle
Dear god yes! After 3 years of having a perfect homepage, I now have to change, as the new one no longer fits my needs. I'm all for change, but a 'Use original IG' option would be nice. Even if it wasn't updated and newer applications would no longer work. My perfect homepage is now destroyed :(.
So if 0.1% of the users are affected 1% of the time. How does it then compare to running your own servers? I don't think gmail ever had an outage that affected the majority of the users at the same time. If gmail have a problem meaning a thousand users cannot access their email for a few hours, it makes it to the headlines on slashdot. If a company with a thousand employees had their mailservers down for a few hours, it would not get nearly as much coverage.
The same idiots that pay to use a BETA product.
Too many people make this mistake, calling Google Apps a beta product.
First off: Gmail is only called "beta" because it is constantly being improved. If you use the version of Gmail within Google Apps, which is stable and not beta, you will find that its features are usually a few months behind Gmail. The same goes for all of Google Apps - it is not a beta product (although it's possible to opt-in to beta features).
Want a high quality FOSS RTS game? Try Warzone 2100!
Yes well inside computers, billions of event occur every second. Hell something as insignificant as a cache miss is a one in a million event.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.