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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."

9 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 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.

    4. 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.

  3. 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?

  4. 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.