I've been trying to access my gmail account all morning, and it appears that both my personal account and Gaj-it.com mail account are down. According to the BBC the service went offline at 0930 GMT with Google saying its was “working hard to resolve this problem”.
More than 113 million people use Google mail worldwide, according to comScore. In a statement, Google said “a number of users” were having problems with Google Mail.
This however has raised a bigger question for me, as I am already dependant on some of Google’s services what impact will it have on people/businesses when any of its services goes down. Already the lack of access to my mail has had a huge impact on me and I actually have to go unprepared to meetings (I know I should know better). The excuse "my email is down" probably isn't going to wash either.
I do have to finish by saying Google should have proper resilience in place so this kind of event should never occur, why and how its happened may be revealed later. What are your thoughts, What impact do you think Google’s services being down will have on you? Have you lost confidence in Google?
7 thoughts on “Google Mail Down, Has this opened your eyes?”
Yes, like you googlemail has been offline since about 9.30 am and no sign of any recovery at the moment.
My Personal and business emails are all reliant on this service and it has cost me money.
One can only hope that it is quickly rectified and does not happen again any time soon.
Perhaps they have suffered some sort of denial of service attack ?
Rob
I was also hit hard by this outage.
Although I use MS Outlook at the office, I forward everything to gmail, because I can search and find much better and faster there than in outlook…
so I could not FIND anything this morning…
Also, I feel assured that popping my gmail-mail and then keeping it in 2 different secure places makes a LOT of sense!
I was not in the least bit impressed when I tried to log on this morning to both my personal Google Mail account, and my business Google Apps account to find that neither worked.
Eric Schmidt said I remember in a video, that Google’s goal was to conquer “ads and apps”. They have ads pretty much cornered, and kudos to them for it. But there was me thinking that the unfallable Google would be a safe option for my business email hosting. Google are going to suffer a serious blow from this, as enterprises aready shy of cloud hosting will be even more cautious as a result of this outage.
My love for and trust in Google is waning.
Thankfully things are back to normal, and hopefully there is some info as to what went wrong.
@Rob – hope your pocket was not too badly hurt, you can use their business service which gaurantee’s 99% service.
@Radicke, have you ever used lookout for your outlook, it allows you to search your outlook emails and I find its great.
http://email.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ&sdn=email&cdn=compute&tm=11&f=00&su=p284.9.336.ip_p504.1.336.ip_&tt=4&bt=1&bts=1&zu=http%3A//www.majorgeeks.com/Lookout_d4808.html
Interms of using it to back-up your emails does make a lot of sense though.
Gmail Fail Cartoon
http://www.pcdisorder.com/2009/02/gmail-down-is-it-world-ending.html
Generally Google is very reliable, and I’d rather have a big company like that who will have the expertise to problem solve even issues that never existed before (including hacker attacks, etc).