The great Gmail outage of 2008

[giza]

So, Gmail dropped offline for a little over an hour yesterday... and it was like a blackout or something. Hundreds of messages were written on various groups complaining about it, and a search on Twitter revealed dozens of posts about Gmail every second. Within an hour, CNET had coverage of the issue as well. The incident even caused Google to apologize in their blog, which is rare for them.

It's funny that even though the outage was just over an hour, many people (myself included) got all up in arms and acted like their world was coming to an end.

All things considered though, Gmail has an astonishing uptime, even for being a free service, and for being as heavily used as it is. I usually have Gmail running in a tab in my browser whether I'm at home or at work, and the last time I can remember a significant outage is at least a year ago. I can certainly say that they have better uptime than my current webhost (3-4 outages over the last year) and certain companies I have done business with in the past.

*goes back to hitting "refresh" obsessively on his Gmail*

Comments

[rickwoods.livejournal.com]

Didn't even notice...

Gmail really does have an amazing amount of uptime though.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

My Flickr account was either hacked twice in a 2 week period, or was corrupted by flickr itself somehow. Eitherway, they are firmly in my "UNSAFE" category now.

[usagiguy.livejournal.com]

I did not notice, but then I use gmail as my secondary address. I really like their service. It is great at filtering out spam.

[eddiddiums.livejournal.com]

The funny thing was, they weren't actually "down"

Gmail was still accessible via the HTML view as well as any stand alone client using POP or IMAP. It was hardly end of the world type stuff. I do, however, think that most people are more surprised than outraged. Who would ever think that Gmail would go down for an hour?

[giza.livejournal.com]

Actually, HTML view didn't work for me either. Trying to send or archive a message (basically anything other than reading a message) gave me a 502 Server Error.

The biggest frustration that I had with the whole outage is the useless generic error messages that Google gave. Rather than, "Hey, we had a hardware failure, please check back in half in hour", or similar, the error was maddenly vague, and merely said, "check back in a few minutes".

Obviously, the situation took a lot longer than "a few minutes" to fix.

[eddiddiums.livejournal.com]

I could not agree more on the error message thing! I actually thought it was just my account and was thus rather worried until I saw a few mentions of it show up on Twiter. That is actually how I found out about the HTML thing :D

[jessypie.livejournal.com]

That was my biggest issue, too - the error message made it sound like it was just MY account having problems, didn't explain what the problems were, and made it sound like the whole thing would be over in a couple of minutes when that very clearly revealed itself to be NOT THE CASE.

I figured it couldn't be just me, but didn't actually get confirmation of that until I saw your messages over on Twitter about the problem. I couldn't find anywhere from the main Gmail page to read any kind of status message or otherwise seek out more information from Google or from other Gmail users.

[simbab.livejournal.com]

That explains why I didn't notice it. I rarely if ever visit gmail.com anymore, I have a copy of Evolution open all the time though.

[smack-jackal.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of levels on which this is kind of funny for me.

Personally, I didn't even notice that they'd been down at all yesterday however since January I've counted eight times when I've gotten friendly error messages when trying to get to my Gmail account. Over the life of my Hotmail and Gmail accounts I've experienced far more outages of my Gmail accounts than my Hotmail accounts.

When I did incident management and resolution for Hotmail, any outage we experienced instantly caused buzz that grew in proportion to the length of outage and number of users affected. The longer you have even a small portion of your user base affected the more that outage will be noticed--and worse--felt by your customers. It wouldn't take very long for any given outage to get the notice of CNet.

Running large scale email services is an enormous pain in the ass.

[nikvulper.livejournal.com]

This is the first I've even heard of it, guess it hit in that sweet spot between "log out of work computer" and "log into home computer".

[roho.livejournal.com]

Not to mention, it's still in Beta according to my GMail page ;)

[rassah.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. This Google obsession on behalf of adoring mobs reminds me of another fandom/obsession/craziness/iLunacy out there.
I kinda wonder if there will be long lines, from 5am on the release day, for Google Android phones when those first come out.

[wildw0lf.livejournal.com]

I hadn't noticed either, but how can people get such up in arms for what is supposed to be a free service?

[giza.livejournal.com]

Actually you're half right. (More on that shortly)

Part of the problem that people such as myself had here with Gmail is that--whether they are charging money or not--Google is marketing Gmail as a premiere email service and encouraging people to use the service. When they make all sorts of claims about how the service is, and get people to switch over to the service, having the service go down tends to piss people off.

On the subject of pay, one of the things that did go down is email for paying customers of Google Apps (http://www.google.com/a). So that was a very clear case of having an outage on a paid service.