Slashdot Mirror
GMail Experiences Serious Outage
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."
Seems to be fine at the moment. Is this the first anti-slashdot-effect?
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
So much for handing your email over to Google
We handed our mail over and it's the first time I've ever had a problem with them as a corporate mail provider. Almost two years. There may have been one other short outage, but I don't remember it being during business hours.
I doubt you could run a mail server more reliably. And, for the difference in cost, I'd stay with Gmail.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I drank the Google kool-aid about six months ago and moved my personal domain's mail over to the free gmail service. I've been extremely happy with it ever since.
I think it's interesting that I couldn't access my personal domain gmail during this outage, but my @gmail.com account worked without issue.
I have been the full time sysadmin responsible for the mail server. I have had the job of keeping the mail service up. It's not cheap. You need redundant networking, redundant servers, redundant storage, redundant staff, and the glue to make sure it all works. For anyone spending less than a couple hundred thousand a year on IT, it's damn near impossible to beat Google's uptime for hosted mail.
As for your other concern about getting the data out of Gmail - you use the same protocols the rest of the Internet uses - IMAP/POP and SMTP. Not rocket science.
It's the same reason Slashdot has:
...and that reason is that code-hackers, having succeeded in something most people find impossible, go on to generalize that they must simply be hypercompetent, and therefore anything done by others must be questionable by comparison. Thus, hosted services, being run by mere mortals, can't be as good as something set up by one's own brilliant self.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I think it's just the psychological impact of the lack of control. It's the same reason that people fear flying more than driving (one of the reasons, anyway) or that it's much scarier when you're the passenger during a dangerous maneuver than if you are driving the car and doing the same thing yourself.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
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?
It's more than that. There are more moving and breakable parts between you and a hosted provider than between you and an internal service, which changes the math a bit.
Some of the single points of failure are shared between both approaches too, so they're a wash for a small implementation. If you're a small company and your non-redundant core switch fails, your email is down either way, because you can't get to your email server or to your hosted provider, no matter how redundant your provider is. There are various components for which this is true, which helps to mitigate the benefit of a hosted service where your mail server is replaced by a massively redundant cluster.
You also have additional dependencies. If you're a small business with a single T1 to the internet, let's say, and the telecom bunker outside your building catches fire and you lose internet access, you've got problems. With a local email service, internal mail works, but you can't send email to or receive email from external users (let's pretend you don't have an offsite secondary MX or an outbound mail spool where this stuff queues, mostly invisibly to users). For organizations that are hugely dependent on internal email, that's quite a bit better than having no access to your (hosted) email at all.
Additionally, you get concerns about "If we outsource this today and we have problems in 2 years, will we still have somebody here who can design/build/find a better solution, or will it cost us a fortune in consultants if we let the in-house expertise lapse?".
You also have support issues. Google specifically is well-known for only doing things that can be automated (and doing them well, mind you). Support isn't always one of those things, and small companies are well-acquainted with getting the shaft from vendors because your business isn't worth enough for them to care (check out the quality differences between the enterprise and SMB versions of various products for examples). Given the importance of email to most organizations today, folks are a bit reluctant to hand it over to an outsider with minimal financial incentive to devote resources to their specific problems.
If you're a 5-person business, outsourcing email is likely a good idea, but once you start getting into the teens and twenties or so, it's probably worth a look at your particular circumstances before continuing that assumption.
Full disclosure: I'm currently a local IT guy for a smaller company, with enough on my to-do list that if I thought outsourcing email would work well for my users and save us time & money, I'd be all over it.
Most of the long distance in the country dropped that day, triggered by 4ESS switches hitting a bug, detecting, it, going offline (with load shifted to other switches). Increased load made the bug in question more likely to be hit, so those switches would in turn drop and shift load away (sometimes back to the originator). 9 hours of basically no long-distance service.
And just think, it was a year and a half before Berners-Lee announced the "World Wide Web" and Linus announced that he was working on this "Linux" thing.
fencepost
just a little off