GFail: Google services down for 2 hours
Google’s Gmail service was unavailable starting around 10:30 AM GMT on Tuesday. Google acknowledged the problem and said it was working to restore service. The scope of the outage was not immediately clear, but at least some users in Europe and Asia could not get access to their inboxes or had to wait a minute or more for them to open. “We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a number of users,” Google said in an advisory on its Gmail support site. “We’re working hard to resolve this problem and will post updates as we have them. We apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused.” Google has had trouble with Gmail before, setting off waves of concerns over the reliability of the service.
Last August, Gmail had three significant outages that affected not only individual consumers of the free Web mail service but also companies and organizations paying for Apps Premier, the company’s hosted suite of collaboration, messaging and office productivity services. Apps Premier costs US$50 per user per year. To compensate for the downtime, Google decided to extend a credit to all Apps Premier customers and also said it would get better at notifying people of problems. Google offers a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee for Gmail for users paying for Google Apps Premier. An outage on Aug. 11 lasted about two hours and affected almost all Apps Premier users. The other two, on Aug. 6 and Aug. 15, hit a small number of Apps Premier users but locked some users out of their accounts for more than 24 hours.
Source: PC World
Comments(34)
If you call this a fail, then all the rlslog downtimes should be called Epic Fail!
there're few differences mate, one, we are completely free and not paid service, and two, we do not serve millions of users such a critical application as email. i could elaborate a bit more if you insist.
^^
hear, hear!
Come on. Two hours of downtime is NOTHING. I hardly see the point in posting a long article about it. This sure ain't the end of the world son.
lol @ comment 1 – very apt
Exactly but not 2 hours i think
i was really worried about my mails
Martin: you are not free at all. You have ads just as GMail does.
99.9% uptime is "per month" I assume, like many hosting account policies.
Minutes in a month = 30 * 24 * 60 = 43200 minutes.
99.9% of 43200 minutes = 43156.8 minutes.
That means 43 minutes is allowed per month downtime. That's the commercial expectation based on the TOS, so 2 hours downtime is a fairly big deal from that point of view.
The fact it's "only 2 hours" doesn't matter. What really matters is that Google is not able to deliver what it says.
sry I meant "SLA" not "TOS".
so those 77 minutes of additional downtime is enough to make you complain? It's a service completely free of charge so the only way you're expected to file a deserved complaint is if you paid for it. You don't, so stop moaning.
Panda, I thought companies counted their "Fine Nines"(or 3 in this case) on a per year basis. That gives them close to 9 hours per year.
also, imap access, offline [gears] access still worked, only fail web access. so stop crying like a wuss
Of course, if they did have a Fine Nines approach they would have used up about 23 years worth of downtime :p
What no torrent links posted for this??
LOL
lol, my gmail is free and gives me more uptime that most paid email providers. rlslog is down 20% of time & has loads of ads & "paid articles", infact i see rlslog as commercialy making more money off me than gmail ever has…. also my balls are dry! dont forget my balls!
Damn You!
This just exemplifies why it is a good idea to have redundant email accounts with various providers for mission critical communications.
2 hours is a long time in the business world.
Internet is over.
III WW is about to come.
Pray!
Ah, this article has reminded me that it's probably about time for RSL to vanish into the ether for another 8 hours or so as it does every couple of weeks.
Paying your "staff" for all their hard work yet Marty?
wiseguy: i second that, it caught me right in the middle of the work, no explanation, just "error 500, please retry in 30s" or sth. like that. I missed my lunch because of this and it totally messed my day.
It's not worth getting your knickers in a twist about. And who cares? The product is still in Beta, which means you shouldn't rely on it for mission-critical anything!
Fair enough, it's been in beta for nigh on five years now, but the fact remains it IS still a beta service, and should be treated as such. Considering how many Google services are free, you can't complain if they have two outages within seven or eight months.
Jeez.
martin you define the word douchebag
I'm just wondering if they fixed the problem with the Email Address Sender spoof that is being used by chineses to steal Gmail accounts.
yeah, saw it down too. Was really annoying.
Rlslog has ads? I dont think i have ever seen them..
I agree with poster #1, a couple of hours outage is nothing compared to rlslog's ouages.
As for Martin's response, I see your view but the fact that people don't pay for your service has no bearing on the desire for your readers to use a functional site. If it was functional and hosted email, you certainly would charge for memberships. That fact that you can't charge for membership just illustrates that Google is offering a superior and preferred service for GMail users.
When rlslog works, its great, but the outages have become intense lately and many people have found similar sites elsewhere that offer identical info and releases.
As for "we do not serve millions of users such a critical application as email."
That's a ridiculous comment in itself. The fact that GMail has better uptime and also hosts email for millions of users just goes to show how reliable thier system really is. If rlslog was to host millions of user's email, the site would last a week at best. I know you would buy new servers etc. but that is still infrastructure you don't and can't currently support, as Gmail does.
All that said, I do appreciate rlslog and the information provded here, but people that live in glass houses should not throw stones, rlslog attempting to make GMail look bad for a few outages is just silly.
@martin lol i'm sorry but i don't pay for gmail either still gmail works. So why again does your site fail to stay online ?
Not like rslog can find any quality products to post about so this is the only 'newsworthy' thing they got :/
Martin conveniently forgot to mention that this site makes him around $8,000 in ad revenues every month (it was much higher, but dropped when the 'old' staff team decided to leave.
With that kind of income for doing so little, you'd expect him to invest in some decent servers wouldn't you?
Linkback:
http://www.c05t1n.net/index.php/blog/personal/34-gmail-a-picat.html
dude… 2 hours is nothing… Apple's paid mobileme is like always down! and thats 100 dollars a year!
Are you kidding me? GFail? they're offering all these FREE services and when they go down for 2 hours you tag them with "Fail" if you don't like them, stop using them and see if you can make your own. Mutts!
@2,Martin: "i could elaborate a bit more if you insist."
Allow me… it doesn't matter one bit if you're free or not, this is the interwebs. 99.9% of it is free. If you don't offer a service at least equal to someone else, ppl simply go somewhere else.