Gmail users report yet another outage
An update was made to this story which removed the original eighth paragraph, which said Google hadn't responded to a request for comment, and replaced it with a statement from the company that continues on paragraph nine.
Gmail users, including those who use it for work as part of the Google Apps hosted suite, are again reporting problems accessing the service.
Reports started streaming into the official Gmail and Google Apps discussion forums on Thursday and continued Friday morning.
It's the third time in the past two weeks that Gmail users have been locked out of their accounts due to the "502 Server Error" login problem.
In the middle of last week, an undetermined number of individual and Apps Gmail users were hit, and it took Google about 15 hours to restore the service for them.
Then on Monday of this week the problem resurfaced. A broad group of Gmail users, including organizations that use it as part of the fee-based Premier version of Google Apps, were affected.
Now the problem is back, according to multiple reports from users. It's not clear how many people have been affected by this latest problem, but those who are detailing their troubles in the discussion forums describe the outages as prolonged.
"Still down. 24 hours and counting. This ceased to be funny long ago. Any of the other users here have any recommendations for another e-mail provider? It's time to start voting with our feet and leaving for greener pastures," wrote a user identified as Howardf42 on Friday morning in a thread devoted to the 502 problem in the Google Apps discussion forum.
Google spokesman Andrew Kovacs said via e-mail that "a small number" of Gmail users and "some" Apps users were impacted by the problem, which is still outstanding and being worked on as of 5:30 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time on Friday.
"We know how important Gmail is to our users, so we take issues like this very seriously, and we apologize for the inconvenience. We encourage anyone having technical difficulty to visit the Gmail or Google Apps discussion groups where we're posting status updates," Kovacs wrote.
Google is a major proponent of the idea of delivering applications and computing services via the Internet, popularly known as "cloud computing."
However,when vendors experience technical problems in their data centers and the performance and availability of the applications is affected, IT and business managers feel helpless, because they can do little to restore the services, while their end-users clamor for solutions.
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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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Hahahaha, OK...so the
Hahahaha,OK...so the reality is...CLOUD COMPUTING WILL NOT WORK under the existing structure of the internet! Businesses cannot afford to lose a day or two of productivity because the IT vendor(in this case Google) will not respond to a business critical issue with the IT infrastructure. The beauty of all this is that the internet in its existing incarnation is a miracle anything works! DNS, Routers, backbones, ISP's. Microsoft also invisions the world in a CLOUD but until the infrastructure of the internet is consolidated and put into the hands of one group for maintanence, management and support...then CLOUD computing is just pie in the sky dreams and has the exact same substance as a cloud!
shaughn, you are obviously
shaughn,you are obviously and idiot. Cloud computing is the way of the future. Stop knocking google and go back to your fleshlight. At least there are good solid companies out there trying to make it a reality.
For the personal users, it
For the personal users, it is a free service so deal with it or go to hotmail or yahoo.For the business users, this is what happens when you outsource expecially to a giant company like google. If you want 100% up time, fault tollerance, and quick responses when there is an outage stop being so cheap and either bring your service in house or pay for a real email hosting service through a smaller company that values your business and cares if your service is down.
Do you really think that Google cares if you get upset about their service being down and leave? They will loose a whole $50 per year per user?
Cloud computing while in theory it is great but in reality it is a joke. If you are willing to trust Google or any other huge company with your documents you are a fool. It is hard enough keep documents secure when they stay in house and you want to transfer them accross the internet to be stored on someone elses server where you have no control over the security of the file?