Gmail users hit by outage again
Gmail malfunctioned on Monday, affecting individual users as well as those for whom this service is their primary workplace e-mail tool via the Google Apps hosted software suite.
It's the second Gmail outage in less than a week, and as the service wobbles, questions persist about Google's ability to provide enterprise-grade software availability and performance.
Google is heavily promoting its Apps collaboration and communication software suite as a SaaS (software-as-a-service) option to conventional, on-premise options like Microsoft's Office and Outlook/Exchange.
While so-called cloud computing services like Apps, in which software and IT infrastructure are provided via the Internet, are convenient in several ways, their Achilles heel is server downtime and slowness.
With suites like Google Apps, vendors host the software in their own data centers, freeing IT and business administrators from the hassles of installing and maintaining applications and from the costs of provisioning hardware for them.
However, when applications go down at the vendors' data centers, IT and business administrators can only fret and wait for the issues to be fixed, leaving them helpless while their end-users complain.
A sampling of how frantic IT and business administrators can get when their vendor-hosted software goes offline can be found in this thread at the official Google Apps Discussion Group devoted to Monday's two-hour Gmail outage.
"Need resolution immediately! I dumped Exchange for Google Apps, please don't disappoint me," reads one message.
Another flustered Apps administrator wrote: "Me too, need a fix fast. I have 20 people calling me wondering why this is down. I think they're going for the rope. Please hurry!!"
Yet another wrote about possibly giving up Apps: "Not at all happy, this is the second time in two weeks this has happened and I see it has happened a number of times in the past. Last time it took 18 hours to fix, not acceptable."
Google didn't immediately reply to a request for comment, so the scope of the problem is unclear, but it apparently was significant enough to warrant a rare apology on the official Gmail blog.
"Many of you had trouble accessing Gmail for a couple of hours this afternoon, and we're really sorry. The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly," wrote Todd Jackson, a Gmail product manager.
He acknowledged that posting such an apology in the blog isn't common for the Gmail team, but the company felt it was warranted "since so many people were impacted."
According to postings from Google officials in Gmail and Apps discussion forums, the problem lasted from around 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. U.S. Eastern time and prevented affected users from accessing their e-mail accounts.
IDG News Service
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Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325
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The comparison to on premise
The comparison to on premise services seems unfair. In larger companies, on premise services are never actually "on premise" anyway, with data centers in different cities and different organizations that behave very much like a separate company while providing the service.Compared with the time people spend applying fix packs to MS-Office suite or Windows, downtime here and there from Google, as high-profile and eye-catching as it may seem, are not out of the norm.
Isn't it incredibly arrogant
Isn't it incredibly arrogant of Google to say that something only deserves an apology because a lot of people were affected? Presumably, if only a couple of thousand paying customers couldn't get their email for 18 hours, no apology would have been necessary?Seems Google has a very long way to go before they understand what it means to deliver service to actual paying customers -- and not just clicks to advertizers.
The author of the article
The author of the article made the statement that you criticize, NOT Google. There are many fine online courses that offer assistance in reading comprehension - I suggest that you look into one.Google has offered the world's leading online search engine for many years. It's infrastructure probably offers an uptime that exceeds 99.99% uptime. This is FAR SUPERIOR to what most Global 2000 firms provide with their own internal systems (when you consider downtime due to failure, hardware and software upgrades, etc.).
Although this situation is regrettable and causes hardships to Google's GMail customers, it's a shame that some people choose to sensationalize rare outages of On-Demand systems such as Google apps, Salesforce.com, and others.
I am sure that blacksmiths howled whenever the newfangled automobile would get stuck in the mud...
Wall Street values On-Demand companies at 10X their revenues... I wonder why?