Tag Archives | Gmail

Yesterday night, I blogged about Gmail’s most recent outage and Google’s communications about it and about glitches in general. This afternoon, Andrew Kovacs of the company’s PR department called to respond to the post. He explained the company’s philosophy about responding to technical issues and conceded that Gmail (which had another major outage on September 1st) has had a rocky month.

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[UPDATE: Google responded to this post with some details about Gmail outages and how it responds to them.]

For about two and a half hours this morning, some Gmail users found that their contacts or the entire service was unavailable. Once the service bounced back, folks continued to debate whether Google outages are a sign of serious trouble or not.

The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Worthen quotes a Gartner study that says corporate e-mail is only available 95.5 % of the time on average, and says Gmail is more robust than many:

About 150 million people have Gmail accounts, making its failures highly public. Even if the service is available 99.9% of the time – the service level that Google guarantees for its corporate customers – it will be unavailable for about nine hours a year. That looks to be around the amount of time that just nearly everyone on the planet notices these failures.

GigaOm’s Om Malik, however, is a nonplussed Google customer:

What really bothers me is the crap Google posts on its Google Apps status page. “We are aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users,” it posted this morning. Seriously, guys? If you look at the number of people complaining on Twitter and Facebook, it sure doesn’t look like only a small subset of users is affected by this.

Google didn’t define what it meant by small–but when a service has as many customers as Gmail does, even a small percentage adds up to a lot of unhappy campers who can’t get their stuff done.

At 9:58am, Google’s Apps Status reported that the glitch had been resolved, and apologized for the disruption. But it didn’t explain what had happened. And unlike the last significant Gmail outage, this one went unacknowledged by the Gmail blog.

Me, I’m still willing to believe that Gmail’s track record for reliability is still respectable. But I’d like to see the company consistently address major outages on the blog, telling us all what happened–even if the circumstances are dreary and technical. The company’s blogs are pretty good as is, but wouldn’t they be even better if they reliably tackled difficult Google news as well as cheery rollouts of new services? And wouldn’t concerned Google customers feel better if the company gave them as much evidence as possible that it takes outages really seriously?

I awoke this morning to find that hundreds of folks were reading an old Techologizer story on Gmail problems–which is always a sign that Gmail is misbehaving on a grand scale. As usual, I checked my own two Gmail accounts, and found that my inboxes were available–but that both were displaying a message I’d never seen before:

Then I checked the Google Apps status page, which confirmed that something was amiss but didn’t mention contacts (I’m also not sure why it calls it “Google Mail,” but let’s avoid addressing that for now):

Lastly, I turned to Twitter, which rarely explains why something is going on, but which can certainly help determine whether it’s widespread. It did confirm that some people can’t get into Gmail, period:

Whatever’s going on, it comes less than a month after Gmail’s last major disruption. When this is sorted out, I hope that Google not only publishes an explanatory blog post, but also one about that addresses more overarching issues concerning Gmail reliability.

So are you having Gmail issues this morning?

[UPDATE AS OF 2:30PM TECHNOLOGIZER TIME: Gmail is back up, at least for me.]

Gmail is not feeling well today. I know because it’s the talk of Twitter. I know because an old Technologizer story happens to be Google’s first result for “gmail down.” Most of all, I know because both my primary work and personal e-mail accounts are on Gmail, and both are giving me an ugly Server Error right now.

I’m not sure how long this has been going on, but it continues as I write this, and it’s not a momentary blip–it’s an extended outage that appears to be affecting much if not all of Gmail’s users. I’m engaging in a little self-flagellation at the moment, since I’ve placed so much trust in Gmail (despite prior evidence it’s not perfect) that I don’t even use its IMAP capabilities to download mail via a traditional client. When Gmail’s not available, neither is my mail. (And important stuff it contains, such as the dial-in info for a conference call I’m supposed to be joining shortly.)

Sweeping Gmail blackouts remain relative rarities, but I’ve been increasingly frustrated with the service’s reliability recently. It often conks out on me temporarily, or behaves so slowly that it might as well be unavailable–and while the cause remains mysterious, I’ve experienced the same symptoms on multiple browsers on different PCs on a variety of networks.

Just this morning, I was soberly considering whether it was time to regretfully move on to something I might find less flaky. I’m still thinking that over, but today’s meltdown has convinced me that at the very least I need to be downloading my messages. I’m a mostly-happy Google freeloader, but the Gmail I’ve been using of late simply isn’t reliable enough to run a business on.

Which brings up today’s T-Poll:

Final note: Google has blogged about the downtime, and says that if you’ve already set up POP or IMAP access it should continue to work. It also says it’s looking into what’s going on and hopes to have more news soon. Once everything’s fixed, I hope very much that it errs on the side of telling us exactly what happened, even if it’s dry and technical…

Gmail’s Labels, which started out as a contrarian alternative to the folders used by every other e-mail app on the planet, are getting more and more folder-like.  Google is moving the list of Labels to sit right below your inbox (you know, where folders generally reside) and now lets you drag e-mails to a Label to organize messages (you know, the way you can with folders). You can also drag Labels onto messages, and can hide Labels.

Unlike many new Gmail features, these aren’t debuting as Gmail Labs experiments–Google is rolling them out to everybody right away. (They haven’t shown up in my Gmail accounts yet, though.)

With these changes in place, I’d say that Labels effectively are folders. Except that one e-mail can be organized with multiple Labels at a time.

Now, if Google would only let me undo Conversation threads and see my inbox in an old-fashioned unthreaded view–or at least put the newest message at the top of a conversation–it would be pretty much perfect.