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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
They sent an email explaining the cause of the... oh wait.
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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!!
So, only James Bond is affected?
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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.
He has a license to kill -9
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).
4 it's an unkucky number in Japan. 17 it's also an ulucky number in Western countries.
Amusingly, it is for the same reason.
In japanese, 4 is pronounced "shi" in the On reading, which is an homonym of "death".
In latin numerals 17 = XVII, which is an anagram of VIXI, which is latin for "I lived", implying "I'm dead".
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
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.
According to the Wikipedia entry for 17:
Described at MIT as 'the least random number', according to hackers' lore.
In Italian culture, the number 17 is considered unlucky.
When viewed as the Roman numeral, XVII, it is then changed anagrammatically to VIXI, which in the Latin language it translates to "I have lived", the perfect implying "My life is over.
The fear of the number 17 is called 'heptadecaphobia' or 'heptakaidekaphobia'.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
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.
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
They're probably thinking "wow, this response is much faster and the downtime much shorter than when we ran our own services".
Nobody has ever sold cloud services with a guarantee of 100% uptime. It is, however, almost certain to be better than the vast majority of companies' homegrown solutions.
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.
Coincidence? we at TV-Show-On-Whacky-Therories don't think so.
Oh, you're with the History(tm) Channel?
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.
One day you'll realize your level of unluckiness when Google announces a 0.0000001% outage, and... that's you!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...