[Macworld]

Post your comments for Gmail suffers widespread outage here

[yugenro]

Oh my gawd! What a HUGE screw-up for Google! Boy, are they gonna lose some credibility for THIS!

[TAllenSr]

Just came back up for me.

[teq5850]

While the web interface to Gmail was down, IMAP/SMTP access didn't appear to be affected.

[OriginalMacRat]

This is the promise of "Cloud Computing" that companies are trying to sell everyone on these days.

[TeaEarleGreyHot]

OriginalMacRat, on 01 September 2009 - 02:05 PM, said:

This is the promise of "Cloud Computing" that companies are trying to sell everyone on these days.

Absolutely, spot-on, correct! Google is a *good* company, and they still suffer outages. Because they're big, they are a target. Cloud computing sounds good now, but eventually all the servers of the cloud will be consolidated, as companies buy one another up, and we'll have all the world's business, financial, academic, and pharmacologic data stored in a handful of warehouses "server farms", and they'll be HUGE targets for those with nefarious motivations. My advice continues to be: keep your own data and applications local, and keep offsite/secure backup. Do NOT let your thoughts drift to the clouds.

[QCassidy352]

yeah, IMAP was Ok throughout, so not that bad. It's amazing how many people have come to rely on google for everything though. One reason I have mobile me is so that all of my eggs aren't in one google-basket.

[JohnnyO]

Google Mail has a web interface? My POP/IMAP/SMTP connections seemed fine all day.

[rab777hp]

This is old news, it ended at about 5PM EDT. (2PM PDT)
And it wasn't that bad, you could use POP/IMAP and SMTP and you could also use the iGoogle gadget, which is better than the basic HTML even. No biggie.

[rab777hp]

Unlike, when MobileMe crashes!
Google crashes wayy less often than Me and, its not even a pay for service. If I wanted a pay for service, I wouldn't buy mobileme because there are much better pay for services out there wit more guaranteed uptime. MobileMe is amateur. Not to mention its got like 2 features.

And when MobileMe has an outage, its completely out, with Gmail, calendar, contacts, etc were fine, just the Gmail web interface, but that didn't matter because you could still access you mail. So much better than MobileMe, which is a complete waste of money.

[mrbach]

rab777hp, on 01 September 2009 - 02:59 PM, said:

Unlike, when MobileMe crashes!
Google crashes wayy less often than Me and, its not even a pay for service. If I wanted a pay for service, I wouldn't buy mobileme because there are much better pay for services out there wit more guaranteed uptime. MobileMe is amateur. Not to mention its got like 2 features.

And when MobileMe has an outage, its completely out, with Gmail, calendar, contacts, etc were fine, just the Gmail web interface, but that didn't matter because you could still access you mail. So much better than MobileMe, which is a complete waste of money.

MobileMe has never gone out for me. It serves up my websites, and lets me build tests sites for clients, it lets me get mail wherever I am in the world, it publishes my photo galleries, lets me store presentations remotely and send huge files by sending a link to my clients.I sync my bookmarks and my address book as well. That seems like more than 2 features to me. I park 3 websites on their right now. All for $120 a year or $12 a month. Cheaper than any other hosting service.

[BradPDX]

For a while there, I was really enjoying the email silence. It interrupted my work and dammit I had to have some lunch, walk the dog and enjoy the sunshine. Terrible, just terrible, the sky is falling!

[cv]

OriginalMacRat, on 01 September 2009 - 02:05 PM, said:

This is the promise of "Cloud Computing" that companies are trying to sell everyone on these days.

You are correct.

If the champion of "cloud computing" (one of the most powerful Internet companies on the planet) can't run a reliable webmail service, the technology and operational practices simply aren't ready for primetime.

With each Google App outage, I'm even more convinced that Google still does not understand the "two-person rule" for production systems.

[ddd1301]

TeaEarleGreyHot, on 01 September 2009 - 02:10 PM, said:

OriginalMacRat, on 01 September 2009 - 02:05 PM, said:

This is the promise of "Cloud Computing" that companies are trying to sell everyone on these days.

Absolutely, spot-on, correct! Google is a *good* company, and they still suffer outages. Because they're big, they are a target. Cloud computing sounds good now, but eventually all the servers of the cloud will be consolidated, as companies buy one another up, and we'll have all the world's business, financial, academic, and pharmacologic data stored in a handful of warehouses "server farms", and they'll be HUGE targets for those with nefarious motivations. My advice continues to be: keep your own data and applications local, and keep offsite/secure backup. Do NOT let your thoughts drift to the clouds.

I agree with this. I sell technology products to customers that provide SaaS. They are up 99.999%. The problem is they will happen to be down when that one customer absolutely needs their data.

I keep multiple copies of my data in my office and one offsite.