Google apologizes for Gmail outage

Updated 6:44 a.m. PST to reflect that Gmail service was restored.

Business and personal users of Gmail suffered an outage starting about 1:30 a.m. PST Tuesday, but Google said it's fixed the problem.

"If you've tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we're having some problems. Shortly after 10 9:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email," said Acacio Cruz, Google's Gmail site reliability manager, in a blog posting Tuesday. "We're working very hard to solve the problem and we're really sorry for the inconvenience."

"The problem is now resolved and users have had access restored," Google said on its Gmail status page. "Many" users were affected, Google said.

Google promises that customers paying for the Google Apps service will have access to Gmail at least 99.9 percent of the time each month or Google has to pay a penalty. So far Google hasn't dipped below that, the company said last year.

The company took advantage of the problem to tout the new Gmail Labs feature that permits offline access to Gmail for customers in the U.S. and U.K. With it, people can read, search, label, and archive their e-mail and compose new messages, but of course messages aren't sent or received until network access is restored.

Outages pose problems for Google as it tries to persuade companies to buy into its cloud-computing vision, in which applications are hosted on the Internet rather than on corporate computers. But Google argues its service availability is competitive with most organizations' abilities to run their own e-mail servers.

[soluto]

Gmail Fail Cartoon

http://www.pcdisorder.com/2009/02/gmail-down-is-it-world-ending.html

[zcollvee]

a good way to show off offline :P

[tomedav]

I was in front of my computer using Gmail and Google Calendar all afternoon.

I didn't notice a thing. If that's what Google calls downtime I just lost my last reason for using Outlook.

When you put a litte more functionality in Docs, Office will go the way of the 8-track and cassettes.

[sullivanjc]

When I checked mail this morning (earlier), I could not get on to the website but could access via IMAP using Thunderbird. That would constitute "degraded", not "down" to me. In any event, it seems to be fully up now,

[cb3431]

It was down because they were reading all your mail while laughing at all the advertisers they convinced to pay them.

[yanchineseguy]

The paying customers of Google Apps don't get advertising, and they're also the ones who get the 99.9% up time guarantee. So far I'm pretty happy with GMail's free version.

[Eludium-Q36]

An uptime of 99.9% per month means they can only be unavailable 45-mins in a month before the penalties kick in.

[eadeguzman]

Anybody here who has the numbers for SLAs on internal corporate/enterprise email? I would think it's much smaller than 45mins/month. email servers are one of the most stable systems in a LAN at least where I work and used to work.

If they do in fact exceed 45mins down time, would they refund you the entire month or just for the 45mins you lost (which would be funny)?

[celticbrewer]

eadeguzman, my company has what is touted as the largest private (ie corporate) network in the world. Our e-mail servers are down more than anything else on the LAN. Even with clusters and all sorts of redundancy and "high availability", at least one of the many servers is down at least once a week for at least 15 minutes or so (and that's on a good week).

[robvme]

Actually, 99.9% = 43.2min/month of downtime. Google does not count planned downtime. Google compensates customers by adding "free" days to the account depending on the level of unavailability.

As for Celticbrewer's comment below, sounds like your company has a People and Process issue. I work for a company that has the largest Exchange implementation in the world and in 10 years we have never been down. Availability goes beyond your mail servers, everything between counts too. How many times have you heard "Exchange is down" only to find out that it was a router or other application making the service unavailalbe? Not sure who your company is, but sounds like you may have issues being down once per week at 15min works out to 1 hour a month or somewhere around 99.8% so you are doing pretty good.

[Vegaman_Dan]

I'm okay with using Google for my free email account. I'm not sure using this as an excuse to promote their offline Google Gears option as a solution to fix their system outage is the way to spin this though.

That's like Toyota saying it's not a problem that our cars catch on fire and explode now and then.... because we have a great service shop that can fix them. Um... right.

[benoitx]

GMail is still not 100%, we seem to have many rejections of emails sent to Groups (under Google App).

Emails sent from one domain under Google App to a Group email under another Google App are now rejected due to "Bulk Sender Guidelines" (worked perfectly yesterday...and it is most definitely not a bulk email).

[Magicland]

We moved our company's mail servers to gmail (free) last summer, and haven't regretted it at all. We've had more downtime due to Time Warner's cable than we have due to gmail.

[rawkinrich]

It was all over Twitter. Big deal, Gmail went down. Where's the panic? Google will only fix the problem and put it back up fairly quickly anyway.

"Run for the hills"!

[dtrammell]

Unfortunately I am still having issues with my Imap on Microsoft Outlook
when I try to move an email from my exchange folder to my Google Imap folder it tells me the connection is refused. I have removed it and added the account back. I am able to log into my account through the website.

[robvme]

Availability/Uptime SLAs:

90% = 72 hours of downtime/month

99.9% = 43.2 minutes of downtime/month

99.99% = 4.32 minutes of downtime/month

99.999% = 25.9 seconds of downtime/month

90% availability would not be acceptable to most businesses while 99.999% is often very difficult to actually achieve.

This is based on 525,600 minutes/yrear (assumes 30 day months). All of these SLAs (above 90%) are very agressive and include both planned and unplanned unless otherwise specified in the SLA between the user and the provider of service. In Google's case, planned downtime is not penalized.

Even so, you have to applaud Google for having such aggressive SLAs, but you may want to read exactly what those SLAs include and exclude and how they are defined. You can see the Google SLA here: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html. I am not certain how many business put their messaging, collaboration and document management in the hands of third parties or if that is even wise. I know that I would not allow Google to handle all of my sensitive communications simply because of their record on privacy.

In the 10 years that I have worked for my company, I have never seen email become unavailable on our Exchange environment. Degredation, yes, but unavailbable, never. If email and messaging are critical to your business, outsourcing it and putting in someone else's hands isn't always the best solution. When you host your own mail, you own it, control it.