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GMail Experiences Serious Outage

Posted by timothy on from the works-here-never-mind dept.

JacobSteelsmith was one of many readers to note an ongoing problem with Gmail: "As I type this, GMail is experiencing a major outage. The application status page says there is a problem with GMail affecting a majority of its users. It states a resolution is expected within the next 1.2 hours (no, not a typo on my part). However, email can still be accessed via POP or IMAP, but not, it appears, through an Android device such as the G1." It's also affecting corporate users: Reader David Lechnyr writes "We run a hosted Google Apps system and have been receiving 502 Server Error responses for the past hour. The unusual thing about this is that our Google phone support rep (which paid accounts get) indicated that this outage is also affecting Google employees as well, making it difficult to coordinate."

22 of 408 comments (clear)

  1. Indeed by pablodiazgutierrez · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So much for handing your email over to Google because it's more reliable than hosting locally...

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    To do list for Windows
    1. Re:Indeed by DSW-128 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I dunno - I've been using G-Mail and Google Apps since each was introduced, and this is the first time one of their outages has impacted me, or anyone else that I talk to (true, that's not a lot of people, but...).

      --
      This .sig is printed on 100% recycled electrons, but is best viewed using 100% fresh photons.
    2. Re:Indeed by tsotha · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yeah, except that it has been extremely reliable. "Reliable" not being the same thing as "perfect".

    3. Re:Indeed by Nerdposeur · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I don't know. Our local email has gone down a few times since I've been here, and this is the first I've heard of Gmail being down.

      Also our local email search sucks horribly. I can find a trivial personal message from 4 years ago on Gmail in a fraction of the time I can find suddenly-important work email from six months ago, if I find it at all.

    4. Re:Indeed by ryanvm · · Score: 4, Insightful
      That was dumb. I have handed over our email because it's more reliable than hosting locally. This was the first time we've been affected in over a year and it was for a little more than an hour. That's an order of magnitude better uptime than we had before.

      Can you beat Google's uptime? I doubt it. Sure, it's not impossible, but you won't be doing it for less than $50/user?

    5. Re:Indeed by ryanvm · · Score: 5, Insightful
      No problem.

      Hi Boss -

      I'm the guy that switched our email service to Google. See, it only costs us $50/year/user and this has been the first outage in over year. We used to pay a full time sysadmin to manage the mail server and would average about 12-20 hours of total downtime per year (maintenance, outages, etc.).

      Obviously, the switch to Google has been much better for the corporate bottom line. Not to mention that we also get calendaring, wiki/sites, docs, and chat for the same price.

      Ah, I'm glad you understand. You have a nice evening too.

    6. Re:Indeed by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Except that instead of affecting one organization, this outage is affecting hundreds at a time.

      --
      Palm trees and 8
    7. Re:Indeed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      365 * 24 = 8760hrs/year "99.99% uptime" = 8759.124

      So to meet 99.99% uptime, you have to have less than 52 minutes of downtime, total, planned and unplanned, in a year. That's really hard. Really. Think about it, few enterprise systems can rarely do that (Peoplesoft update in 50 minutes? HA!). But here, a 1.2hr outage puts them firmly out of the four nines club.

  2. Not surprising by Caustic+Soda · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't know that this is actually news-worthy. I have never worked for a company which has not suffered email outages, no matter how their email is supported. Granted, GMail has a large list of client companies, but you are a fool of the highest order if you think the name will protect you from outages.

    1. Re:Not surprising by TheRealFixer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think the real story here is that it outlines the downside to moving everything to The Cloud, as a lot of people are trying to promote these days. As you said, email outages are pretty common even at large enterprises. The difference is, CIOs like to be able to go and yell at someone in their office for an outage, and know that it's being worked on in some measurable fashion. They don't like it when your answer is, "I don't know what's going on. Ask Google."

      The Cloud is great, as long as it always works. But, in my experience, downtime is far less tolerated in hosted solutions than it is in on-site infrastructure. And stories like this make executives nervous about this stuff.

    2. Re:Not surprising by drachenstern · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This is front-page worthy because it let's us all know that we're not losing our frigging individual minds over this, that it IS a collective problem. The fact that google knew what the problem was and fixed it before it had time to hit the frontpage of /. just goes to show that they are trying and they do care.

      Personally, this just renews my confidence in Goog, regardless of what the twats are doing inside the beltway...

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      2^3 * 31 * 647
  3. It's spotty by bobdehnhardt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As I type this, I can get in to GMail just fine, but a friend in Texas can't (I'm in Nevada). Guess Google likes us better.

    And kudos to the Google team for updating the status when they say they will. Looks like the script they use automatically puts current time + 1 hour in as the default next update time, and they're posting updates before that expire. Too many times, something simple like that gets overlooked.

  4. Depend on something... pay for admin by johnjones · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think Gmail is a great service for personal accounts...

    but for business sorry you need to pay a real live person or support company who will actually be able to deal with your data

    how do you get the data out of gmail to switch providers ?

    ever serviced a discovery litigation from google ?
    (you know where they judge you guilty of you dont come up with the data)

    sorry but there is a good reason to keep this stuff on site and working...

    regards

    John Jones

    1. Re:Depend on something... pay for admin by jcausey · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Feel like I'm feeding a troll, but johnjones's ID is so low that I feel this silliness may be taken seriously:

      how do you get the data out of gmail to switch providers ?

      Same way you would do any remote hosted email migration. POP and IMAP. Additional tools are provided for Google Apps (their for-pay version).

      ever serviced a discovery litigation from google ? (you know where they judge you guilty of you dont come up with the data)

      sorry but there is a good reason to keep this stuff on site and working...

      Umm, an hour of downtime doesn't mean your data is gone. I'll also echo earlier comments -- locally hosted email generally has more problems, as no company but the largest enterprise has the same magnitude of IT equipment and experience as Google.

      I've never really understood why so many Slashdotters have this attitude about hosted services. Perhaps they are local IT folks for smaller companies, and fear for their jobs?

  5. Eating their own dog food by Max+Romantschuk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It it's true that this outage is affecting Google too I have to say that is a good thing. Eating your own dog food, product-wise, is always a good idea.

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    .: Max Romantschuk :: http://max.romantschuk.fi/
    1. Re:Eating their own dog food by blamanj · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's a good idea as long as your allowed to do something about it. At some companies, you just use it and suffer. From what I've seen, the culture at Google allows people to make contributions (e.g., Labs) to fix things.

  6. eating your own dogfood by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Upside: shows confidence in your products; makes it more likely that your engineers will spot problems if they use the software and services themselves; can increase how motivated people are to improve the products

    Downside: tainted dogfood kills the engineers who would have investigated the issue

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  7. Re:Wow by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why would you fire the guy who caused it. He would probably be the most carful employee after that. People learn from mistakes firing people even for big mistakes isn't a solid business model and bad HR.

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    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  8. Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect by sortius_nod · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Because your company and personal sandbox are valid representation of a mail system that serves millions of people. When either of your servers do that you can post bullshit like this.

    Hell, even the company I work for has outages for both proactive and reactive maintenance, and that's only for 5000 people.

    To say that because you've never had an outage you never will have an outage is absurd.

    On top of this, saying that google should "have a backup" is silly. Do you even understand how redundancy works? Do you even understand how web based mail systems work? I really don't think so from this comment. If the error has nothing to do with servers falling over and is an issue with routing then you can have all the redundancy you want, but it won't make a difference.

    At this stage it's any comments are merely conjecture, until google make a press release advising of what happened comments like "have a backup" are just troll posts.

  9. Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect by Mike+Buddha · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yeah, that's funny. You know what's also funny? The treadmill I bought 3 years ago and never used is in mint condtion. I've never had a problem with it sitting there under the pile of clothes in the corner. I read that 24 Hour Fitness has TONS of problems with their treadmills going down, but mine just keeps going without a single issue. I guess they just bought the wrong brand. Stupid idiots.

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    by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
  10. No you don't. by raehl · · Score: 3, Insightful

    but you also have to pay google for the privilege of asking "so whats wrong?

    Or, you could NOT pay Google at all, and when something goes wrong, realize that being able to call and ask what is going wrong is not going to get it fixed any sooner, and wait until they fix it.

    Having someone soothe you over the phone during the process is a waste of money.

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    paintball
  11. Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect by Grishnakh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Because your company and personal sandbox are valid representation of a mail system that serves millions of people. When either of your servers do that you can post bullshit like this.

    The parent poster's simple little postfix system doesn't NEED to serve millions of people. That's a feature: by not needing the immense complexity that goes along with running a web-based email system serving millions of people, his system is smaller, simpler, and less prone to problems.

    It's impressive that Google's Gmail runs as well as it does given its size, but smaller, simpler solutions are almost always preferable. For company email (especially in a small company, not some behemoth company with 100k employees needing lots of mail servers), it simply makes more sense to use a small, simple mail server like the parent's postfix system, rather than to rely on some external vendor's multimillion-user system. Especially since the software needed to run that system is all available for free.