- Monday, 9 November 2009
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Gentlemen, we are now in a state of necessity, and necessity knows no law - Reich Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg
Google fails some users for more than 24 hours
SOME OF GOOGLE'S Gmail and Apps cloud computing users suffered an extended service outage Wednesday and Thursday.
An alert posted at about 2pm Pacific Time on Wednesday announced that "a small number of users" were affected by a problem with Gmail access. Some Gmail and Apps customers said they were getting "502 Gateway" errors when they tried to access their accounts.
One and a half hours later, another post estimated that Google would get the problem fixed by 6pm Pacific Time on Thursday.
That was cold comfort for some Google Apps administrators whose companies had come to rely on Gmail and Apps to run their businesses.
One hapless network administrator posted, "This is considered a mission-critical issue here. We may have to make other arrangements. Apparently, Google mail is not very reliable. I think I would have pushed for something else before we switched if I had known the level of unreliability."
Another user wrote, "This outage has hit us pretty hard and we've been out of email for 24 hours and now business is suffering. My guess is Google is doing everything they can for now but I just wish I had setup a forward or an alternative solution to not loose (sic) business for a day."
A little after 6pm Pacific Time on Thursday, Google announced that the problem had been resolved. It didn't reveal what the problem was or why it took the company so long to fix it.
It's not known whether the affected accounts included just those using Google's free Gmail and Apps services or also those using its Premier Edition that costs $50 per user annually.
But Google wouldn't interrupt service to its free Gmail and Apps users as a way to suggest that they might want to switch to its paid services, would it? ยต
See Also
Stallman
warns against cloud computing
L'Inq
Computerworld
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Hey computer glitches happen and like ssj4Gogeta said, you cant complain about a free service (although people seem to think that it is their duty to).

As for the suggestion by Steve W...
Don't you remember Hotmail's problems a few months ago? Their servers were refusing some peoples connections for a week. Their were angry people allover the next (I was also affected for the first 3 days) although Microsoft denied their was a problem at first. At least Google has a history of coming clean about these things. Moral of the story, glitches will happen, no matter the computer savvy company responsible.
you can't complain about the quality of something you're getting for free. google's free services are much, MUCH better than the paid services offered by any other company so a failure once every few years is quite acceptable.

"But Google wouldn't interrupt service to its free Gmail and Apps users as a way to suggest that they might want to switch to its paid services, would it?"
no google would never do that.
not a big deal like lack of email service, but iGoogle is failing too. They just pushed out the mandatory update which doesn't allow users to choose to utilize or go back to the previous version at will. 

I'm very unhappy with the way they're handling RSS feeds now. Makes much less useful- either you wade through the descriptions for every headline, or you get no description whatsoever.

They'll probably fix it, but honestly, how did the test users not pick up on this during the testing?

http://groups.google.com/group/feedback-on-new-igoogle?lnk=
Why not try hotmail lol
Seriously if its mission critical you shouldne be using Gmail, the fault is yours not Googles.

google is still having problems -- new accounts are frozen with service not found errors after registration as of today. its still ongoing and the fix seems to have broken new signups on google apps (paid corporate accounts)