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Extended Gmail Outage Frustrates Admins

Posted by timothy on from the pulling-out-doesn't-sound-manly dept.

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?"

20 of 430 comments (clear)

  1. The benefits of cloud computing by mlwmohawk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Someone else deals with all the problems, right?

    1. Re:The benefits of cloud computing by Thelasko · · Score: 5, Funny

      Remember folks, it's still in beta!

      --
      One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
    2. Re:The benefits of cloud computing by electrictroy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
    3. Re:The benefits of cloud computing by mlwmohawk · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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."

    4. Re:The benefits of cloud computing by twistedsymphony · · Score: 5, Funny

      Something tells me that an email system that only depends on your hard drive with no net connection wouldn't be very useful.

      FWIW I don't seem to be having any problems getting gmail through my gmail-lite install.

      --
      Collector's Edition
    5. Re:The benefits of cloud computing by tolan-b · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    6. Re:The benefits of cloud computing by Moebius+Loop · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

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      have you been seen on slash?
    7. Re:The benefits of cloud computing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      What's a chlorine drive?

    8. Re:The benefits of cloud computing by Firehed · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
    9. Re:The benefits of cloud computing by kestasjk · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

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      // MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
    10. Re:The benefits of cloud computing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. Stallman is laughing by Rinisari · · Score: 5, Funny

    Is that the sound of cloud computing advocates crying, or the sound of Richard Stallman laughing?

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    Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
    1. Re:Stallman is laughing by Etrias · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  3. If you need something done right do it yourself! by EncryptedSoldier · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. These guys need a brain transplant... by Khyber · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

    --
    Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    1. Re:These guys need a brain transplant... by Rary · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --

      "You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein

  5. it can go both ways by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
  6. There is an SLA for paying customers by Que_Ball · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  7. Banner ads to the contrary by HalInc · · Score: 5, Funny

    In poignant irony, the banner ad I see above the story is a google ad that reads:

    "So why not switch to Google Apps?
    We maintain our hosted software 24/7 so you can sleep at night."

  8. Re:the "small IT shops are worse than SaaS" BS by Terrasque · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yeah, got a rude awakening there myself. My gmail account was closed a month ago, no prior warning. No way to get to support. No way to actually contact a human.

    I still have absolutely no clue why it was closed. I also lost blog, gallery, docs, calendar, site stats, rss reader, notebook... You get the idea. Luckily I didn't have any serious data there, but still. It's a lot of things I used daily just suddenly gone.

    And google's ToS says "We can close an account for any reason. Absolutely any reason. Like, we didn't like the color of the sky today is a good reason." Which isn't helping the issue much either.

    --
    It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."