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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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So, only James Bond is affected?
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Sounds like you have a comparatively high number of potential points of failure compared to the cloud services.
This is the real benefit with Google Apps. When Google Apps is down...I don't have to do anything! Life is good.
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.
Yeah, but the difference is, if something breaks, you can fix it.
It might make one feel like they're taking a more "active" role in the problem, but you're likely to spend as much time fixing your homegrown solution as Google is fixing Gmail. With the cloud solution when something goes wrong though SOMEONE ELSE fixes it.
Besides - Gmail actually has an "offline" mode available for Chrome users. For those really that worried about downtime they can use that.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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.
Yeah, but the difference is, if something breaks, you can fix it.
Alternatively, if something breaks in Google's servers, it gets immediate attention by people who know a hell of a lot more than I do about maintaining a server. And things are multiply redundant, making something breaking comparatively unlikely.
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!
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.
Confirmed here ... it was down for about an hour including the admin control panel.
One nice thing about multi-tennancy is problems get attention immediately.. they simply cannot be ignored.