Earlier today, GMail went down hard. In the web interface, you might have seen these symptoms:
...taking longer than usual...
...502 server error...
...still working...
...encountered a problem...
And on the iPhone, you may have seen some of these:
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 |
In fact I am still seeing the SMTP problem on the right. But IMAP was working throughout the whole ordeal.
On Twitter, Facebook and the like, I immediately observed a lot of chatter about the perils of software as a service, how you can’t trust the cloud, and similar Chicken Little-type symptoms. While GMail isn’t really “the cloud,” this outage shows that a virtually unlimited budget and some of the smartest minds in the industry can still leave points of failure. One quote was, “See what happens? Now imagine if that was something important!”
Well, e-mail is important, frankly. I make fun of social networking sites like Twitter, who fail to prepare for scale (or are simply blindsided by overnight success). But in this case, I am not belittling the outcry at all, even from grandma waiting for her WalMart newsletter to arrive in her Inbox. For companies like ours, that have switched from corporate platforms (read:Exchange + Office) to Google Docs, much of our work can come to an absolute standstill when this kind of thing happens. While it is not the end of the end, as the title of this post suggests, an outage of an hour (in this case it was about two hours) can range from a minor inconvenience to a complete disaster. Don’t get me wrong; an hour without e-mail can often be like a mini-vacation, but it can also be very stressful.
I guess we’ll find out soon enough what this outage was all about. Several news outlets have already reported the issue (Washington Post, USA Today, NY Times). The latter has instructions on how to check GMail server status.
In the meantime, what do you think? Has this event changed your perception of GMail, the reliability of “local” e-mail services like Exchange or Lotus Notes, or Google’s ability to provide stable software-as-a-service?
Aaron Bertrand
Senior Data Architect, OTOlabs
http://www.otolabs.com
I’m pulling all my stuff off of Gmail and going back to Pine. I know I’ll be trading in a lot of features but at least my email won’t go down for an hour once every ten or eleven months.
Maybe.
Um….it’s an outage. It happens! I do not know of a single web service that does not experience these issues. I know I was not terribly inconvenienced for a second over this incident. Seems very Chicken Little to invest so much time calling it out.
Come on Jeremi, it’s a hot topic and hard to ignore and pretend it didn’t happen. Monsters like google have multiple layers of redundancy and simply don’t have an outage like this at the frequency of lower capital web properties. And most of the other folks that do have outages are providing far less essential services.
I don’t know Aaron. When we used to manage e-mail through Exchange our IT would send monthly e-mails that it would be down for a couple of hours at a time. Did not see anyone blogging about that. With all of the additional benefits that Google is bringing to the Enterprise, this just seems like a massive over reaction. Its not like they went down for days.
Microsoft
Of course services like Exchange go down for planned maintenance windows. The GMail outage did not seem like planned maintenance at all, but as it turns out, it was - just not very well-planned:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/01/why-gmail-failed-today/
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/more-on-todays-gmail-issue.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8232971.stm
Anyway, I’m not over-reacting, I’m just commenting on the buzz and trying to spur some dialog. I even made fun of the Chicken Little reactions of others. The outage didn’t affect me, in fact I was on the train when it happened and had much else to do but throw together this post and screen shots. The only time I really invested was swapping out the fail whale for the GMail icon in the first picture, which took about 6 minutes all told.
I am pretty happy with the move to GMail, and I’m not trying to slam them. I just expected better redundancy out of such a market leader, and was overwhelmed by the number of conversations that sparked up over it.
A Pine emulator for Google Mail would make me happy
I liked Eudora. I wonder if that’s still around. There’s a Lab in Gmail that will kick you off at set intervals to force you to get stuff done. Even last time gmail went down it was available through client aps.
-M
[...] few weeks ago, I poked fun at the overreactions to Gmail’s service outage on September 1st. At the same time, however, I made it clear [...]