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Google Blames Gmail Troubles On Maintenance Goof
Slatterz writes "Google has apologised for the two-and-a-half-hour Gmail outage on Tuesday morning, and admitted that the cause was down to data center maintenance. 'Lots of people around the world who rely on Gmail were disrupted during their waking and working hours, and we are very sorry. We did everything we could to restore access as soon as possible, and the issue is now resolved,' said Gmail site reliability manager Acacio Cruz in a blog post. Google had been testing new code designed to keep data geographically closer to its owner, which brought about disruption when maintenance in one data center caused another facility to be overloaded. This had a cascade effect, according to Google, and it took the company an hour to get it back under control."
Nobody complain about that silly beta label anymore.
The fact that they have corporate accounts paying for access to the service should preclude the 'beta' label. I like a lot of what Google has done, but sometimes it seems like the whole beta thing is just a convenient excuse for failure, or as a free pass for iffy behavior like testing in production.
It's a FREE service. I don't have a problem with an outage when the service is free. It's when I pay for a premium service, they can't keep it stable, and finally raise my rate to cover their idiocy that p*sses me off.
Been this way since at least last Thursday (Feb 18) for me. I have several contacts ($grandboss, $director (who's out sick), and $wife among others) that insist on using GMail/GTalk, all of them went "remote-server-not-found" last week, with no changes on my end. As a lark, I restarted my XMPP server, without it making a difference. If I had to guess, server federation was deactivated on the Google end, out that's just a WAG on my part.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
Google has a better uptime than any pay email service I know of anyways. I'm pegging Gmail at around 4 9s and the search engine to around 5~6. Most ISPs get 2 9s and business ISPs 3, 4 if you hit the ISP jackpot (even then i'd be shocked). So how are people so up in arms about this? Sheesh if you saved it up you'd get a day off once every 30 years. Which reminds me, nevermind ISPs. You get less uptime for ELECTRICITY in north america than you do google, going just on the continent wide outage a few years back.
Google is an innovative company, and innovation often includes trial and error as well as improvements to an original idea. No one makes you use their products, and in this case, gmail is only one of many email providers. If you would prefer slightly more reliability from a corporation providing a product guarantee, feel free to look elsewhere. I like the way gmail works much more than any other email app I've tried, and am happy to accept the occasional issue, especially for all of the positive developments that have come from continued work on the project. Remember not so long ago when you couldn't chat in gmail?
First off, it's free, it gives you 7 Gigs of mail storage and it's accessible from any where or any device with an Internet connection.
It searches through my 4 years of e-mail faster than Outlook ( in cached Exchange mode) can search
the last week. They keep adding features - for free;
have no annoying Flash ads and the ones they do have are off on the extremes of the page.
If you don't like it, stop using them - I promise you there won't be any pesky cancellation fees.
Hotmail and Yahoo await you and we'll miss you all - maybe.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
And this isn't their first outage. The last one I remember was April of 2008.
Having seen forum threads around the internet discussing gmail downtimes in the past a general trend is, that only one or two persons see an outage, everybody else can access gmail just fine. That makes me think the majority of their downtimes only affect a tiny fraction of their users. If you count all outages even though they affected maybe just 1% of users, then you are not giving correct availability figures. If 1% of the time there is an outage for 1% of the users, the availability isn't 0.99, it is 0.9999. This latest outage was an exception, I don't think gmail ever before had an outage affecting the same number of users.
Be thankful that, at least, Google calls their testing versions "beta", not "Sevice Pack n" | n < 2.
They want people to use gmail, which is of course the reason they offer it in the first place. They make a significant profit off it, and would lose money if they drove away users.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You strike me as fitting the stereotype I have of the typical user at my place of work. A service can be running for months (or even years) on end without a single glitch, yet the thing goes down for a little bit and they act like the previous aeons of total reliability never happened. Ever. A good many even go so far as actually saying "insert some service or other" never fucking works, it's always broken! This lie filters up the chain and two days later you're in the big office explaining shit you should never have to explain.
I really doubt more reliable service providers actually exist in any great number for it to matter to you - in a nutshell - you put all your eggs in one basket and you suffered for 24 hours or so. For me the downtime really was just 2 hours 30 minutes, and I'm inclined to believe Google are telling the truth on this - I suspect some of your problems lay elsewhere, I'd start with your ISP.