Outage Knocks Gmail Offline For Many Users

Many readers noted an outage affecting Google's gmail service last night. Firmafest points to a statement from Google, according to which only a small subset of users were affected. According to reader CaptHarlock, mail itself remained accessible through IMAP clients, and the chat feature via external applications. jw3 asks "Of course, gmail is just one of the many providers of web-based e-mails. When I look around, almost everyone seems to be using them nowadays. So — what do you do? Do you trust that the site of your web-based e-mail provider will never go down? Do you make backups of all your e-mails?" (Some readers still seem to be unable to reach the site, too.)

Comments

Never go down?

[onion2k]

Do you trust that the site of your web-based e-mail provider will never go down?

100% uptime is possible, sure, but you're going to have to pay for it. It'll be horrifically expensive (thousands of dollars a month) because you'll need multiple levels of redunancy across your MTA server(s), web server(s), and connectivity, in two or three locations.

So, because that's a ridiculous expense for practically everyone, you should just chill out. A morning without your email isn't going to kill you. In fact, it might even be good for you. Take some time out. Go for a walk. Spend a few hours with your wife/kids/friends/dog.

People are talking about this outage like it was the end of the world. It made the BBC news! I swear the entire world has lost all sense of perspective (except me, natch).

(I was tempted to make a joke about email services being like girlfriends and how you don't need one that never goes down, but I thought that might be tacky. :) )