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Google Apps Suffering Partial Outage
First time accepted submitter Landy DeField writes "Tried accessing your Gmail today? You may be faced with 'Temporary Error (500)' error message. Tried to get more detailed information by clicking on the 'Show Detailed Technical Info' link which loads a single line... 'Numeric Code: 5.' Clicked on the App status dashboard link. All were green except for the Admin Control Panel / API. Took a glance 2 minutes ago and now, Google mail and Google Drive are orange and Admin Control Panel / API is red. Look forward to the actual ...'Detailed Technical Info' on what is going on."
The apps dashboard confirms that there is a partial outage of many Google Apps. The Next Web ran a quick article about this, and in the process discovered there was an outage on the same date last year.
It's like the start of a new tradition! Yay! :3
4/17/13 9:09 AM
We are continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by 4/17/13 9:55 AM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem.
This issue is affecting less than 0.007% of the Google Mail user base. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail.
I'm sure many companies who switched their productivity to Google apps are panicking... and wondering ...
They sent an email explaining the cause of the... oh wait.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
In the mean time...I'm working in my desktop machine, saving to my own disk (with automatic backup to my server AND my machine at work) and getting my mail into my own server not depending one ounce on any cloud services. Life is good.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
This took down one of our clients who pay for Google apps. So it's not just the freebie users who got affected on this, hence Google's rapid response.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
4 it's an unkucky number in Japan. 17 it's also an ulucky number in Western countries. Coincidence? we at TV-Show-On-Whacky-Therories don't think so.
It's been said before and again. You shouldn't rely on the cloud as your sole point of data access.
It's fine for backup and collaboration, but otherwise... I'm always a fan of in-house.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Was unable to log into Youtube starting around 9pm Pacific. The log in prompt would just redirect in a loop and eventually reload the homepage with out ever giving any login dialog.
Because in-house servers NEVER go down.
The only difference between in house and cloud-based email in this case is who the fingers get pointed at when the fecal matter hits the air conveyance device.
That's not the only difference.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Right. Because the boss is sure to say: "You chose to use the cloud, and now it's down, but don't worry ... it's not your fault"
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
google gmail is always having outdage on this day, may be they are doing upgrading or Htaccess problem
It's better, arguably, to have the servers in house because at least you can be seen working feverishly to fix the problems rather than just sitting on your hands telling your boss to be patient.
It is better to be competent, than incompetent. It is better to have the servers in house if you are competent. Of course, if you are competent, then you already have the servers in house ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
This is easily solved by keeping an old tower around, prefereably with lots of fans and blinky lights. When something is down, you drag an impressive amount of gear and supplies around it (Mountain Dews, Cheetos, beer, etc.) and look busy until Google figures it out.
They'll never know. If they ask, you are working on the Google 'preprocessor' or something like that.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Oh, and this is why Slashdot needs to keep this sparse UI - from a distance it looks like every other debugger / testing program. Close up it's incoherent garbage which is exactly what a debugging / testing program would look like to a layman.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
We switched to Google Apps a few years ago. In that time I've seen maybe a dozen full or partial outages. Some were not Google's fault. Internet routing or DNS problems were responsible some of the time. One instance was when a drunk driver hit a telephone pole about a quarter of a mile away and severed our fiber connection. When it is down, I still end up spending half the day dealing with the outage. But In a decade of running our email in house, I had just one outage. We did have a few instances of where our Internet connection was down so outside email did not flow, but at least internal communications worked.
This is still funny!
The tiniest open-source violin plays for you. (or at least it would if you had a local copy of tiny_opensource_violin.flac)
Sorry, this is my fault. I stupidly clicked "Update all apps" this morning.
Sorry.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
... someone just discovered Chobits it seems.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Just woke up, checked my Gmail account, got mail, rolling over to go back to sleep....
We switched to Google Apps a few years ago. In that time I've seen maybe a dozen full or partial outages. Some were not Google's fault. Internet routing or DNS problems were responsible some of the time. One instance was when a drunk driver hit a telephone pole about a quarter of a mile away and severed our fiber connection. When it is down, I still end up spending half the day dealing with the outage. But In a decade of running our email in house, I had just one outage. We did have a few instances of where our Internet connection was down so outside email did not flow, but at least internal communications worked.
Ok. So if you are running you Google for Business correctly you should still have access to local copies of important documents and critical email accounts should all be going through a local non web based client that downloads emails locally. ...
So how many times in the decade of running you local email did you have issues that made things the same as if Google was down and you were doing things correctly?
What I see there is you saying
Sometimes when Google was down it was stuff that would have effected us even with our own servers.
Sometimes it was not.
Sometimes when I ran my own servers I got affected.
OMG Google sucks.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Actually... yes.
You'd be amazed how often glitches such as "router at the hotel the boss is staying at is not working properly" becomes "bloody useless IT department, should have outsourced the lot to somewhere with cheaper labour years ago, at least that way I'd be paying for what I'm getting" when the boss can't get at internally-hosted email while on the road.
This doesn't seem to happen anything like as often when the email is outsourced.
Meaning that even if you are regularly providing five-9's - hell, even if you can prove it - nobody believes you.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of chromebooks suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
The only person the finger should ever get pointed to is the CEO who couldn't justify a colo site for failover cause s/he are too busy stuffing their pockets w that money in the form of "bonuses". Both in-house and cloud suffer from this. But those that really don't want downtime, find it perfectly achievable, though not free.
Sorry for advertising my own product, but pretty much on topic here. :) Buy two (cheap) servers from completely different networks / data center providers, and keep them replicated with http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Replication. You can set up MX records to both of them, and use DNS to switch between the replicas for IMAP/POP3 as needed. Either one of the data centers can die and your mail won't stop working. Or keep one of the replicas in local network and your mail keeps working even if your internet connection dies.
(Then you'll only need to hope that there are no software bugs bringing down everything.)
cmd.exe /s
;)
dir
I do that and walk away. Text scrolls up the screen. Everyone thinks it's computer magic. I go outside, smoke and chat.
Renaming takes longer...
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
I never said Google sucks. I'm just pointing out some of the trade-offs. When you go web-based for your groupware application, the Internet at large becomes much more critical to your internal communications, to the point that any Internet disruptions have a large effect on internal communications. That's just the way it is. As I said, I had ONE complete outage with the internal mail server. Sure, we always had periodic Internet outages, but we we are a school with just one location, so we are pretty self contained in our needs. Internet access being down does not bring this place to a screeching halt, or didn't when we handled email in-house.
Switching to Google Apps has been good overall. While we have had more frequent interruptions, the recovery time has been pretty short. Google can back up data better than I can and has never lost data for us irretrievably... that I know of. The one time our in house server went down there was some data I could not recover. Due to the AC getting turned off over a weekend, the groupware server malfunctioned, corrupting user data and the server configuration. The data mirror got corrupted as well, so I had to go back to tape for some stuff and recover what I could from the corrupted data stores. It took a couple of days to get it completely up and running again.
Huh. You know that IT folks can make bad decisions without a CEO's help, right? And really, when was the last time you really wanted the CEO making policy decisions for the IT department.
If you are in the unfortunate position of having to justify more spending to mitigate risks, the best policy is usually just to warn the CEO of the risks in writing. Add dollar signs to make sure they are paying attention: "In the event of a failure, recovery costs are likely to excede $###,### per failure. This risk appears to justify the cost of purchasing and installing XYZ equipment."
Contrary to popular belief, CEOs are not to blame for every corporate disaster. Good luck.
Lets start refering to The War Against Terror by it's initials. . .
I'd imagine most CEOs are involved in business continuity plans, which involve disaster recovery, so there's a very good reason CEO's get blamed often times (they're ultimately responsible).
Never said that. Nice straw man.
However, there are more potential points of failure with the cloud, so a well maintained in-house solution is generally better, because it eliminates many of the external network points of failure. It also allows for multiple points of on-site failover as well as offsite failover (in the case of onsite catastrophe).
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).