Google Blames Gmail Troubles On Maintenance Goof 109
Slatterz writes "Google has apologised for the two-and-a-half-hour Gmail outage on Tuesday morning, and admitted that the cause was down to data center maintenance. 'Lots of people around the world who rely on Gmail were disrupted during their waking and working hours, and we are very sorry. We did everything we could to restore access as soon as possible, and the issue is now resolved,' said Gmail site reliability manager Acacio Cruz in a blog post. Google had been testing new code designed to keep data geographically closer to its owner, which brought about disruption when maintenance in one data center caused another facility to be overloaded. This had a cascade effect, according to Google, and it took the company an hour to get it back under control."
This is why we're still beta. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Beta = Test Environment (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Fast-forward 100 years... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a FREE service. I don't have a problem with an outage when the service is free. It's when I pay for a premium service, they can't keep it stable, and finally raise my rate to cover their idiocy that p*sses me off.
Re:Problems with Jabber connections to GMail users (Score:5, Insightful)
Been this way since at least last Thursday (Feb 18) for me. I have several contacts ($grandboss, $director (who's out sick), and $wife among others) that insist on using GMail/GTalk, all of them went "remote-server-not-found" last week, with no changes on my end. As a lark, I restarted my XMPP server, without it making a difference. If I had to guess, server federation was deactivated on the Google end, out that's just a WAG on my part.
Re:Fast-forward 100 years... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Beta = Test Environment (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop complaining people, it wasn't that big a deal (Score:5, Insightful)
First off, it's free, it gives you 7 Gigs of mail storage and it's accessible from any where or any device with an Internet connection.
It searches through my 4 years of e-mail faster than Outlook ( in cached Exchange mode) can search
the last week. They keep adding features - for free;
have no annoying Flash ads and the ones they do have are off on the extremes of the page.
If you don't like it, stop using them - I promise you there won't be any pesky cancellation fees.
Hotmail and Yahoo await you and we'll miss you all - maybe.
Re:Fast-forward 100 years... (Score:2, Insightful)
And this isn't their first outage. The last one I remember was April of 2008.
Having seen forum threads around the internet discussing gmail downtimes in the past a general trend is, that only one or two persons see an outage, everybody else can access gmail just fine. That makes me think the majority of their downtimes only affect a tiny fraction of their users. If you count all outages even though they affected maybe just 1% of users, then you are not giving correct availability figures. If 1% of the time there is an outage for 1% of the users, the availability isn't 0.99, it is 0.9999. This latest outage was an exception, I don't think gmail ever before had an outage affecting the same number of users.
Re:Beta = Test Environment (Score:2, Insightful)
Be thankful that, at least, Google calls their testing versions "beta", not "Sevice Pack n" | n < 2.
there's a reason they didn't say that (Score:3, Insightful)
They want people to use gmail, which is of course the reason they offer it in the first place. They make a significant profit off it, and would lose money if they drove away users.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)