Comments on: Gmail outage afflicts some users

'Tis the season for flaky Webmail. A Gmail outage Thursday follows Yahoo and Microsoft problems last week.

[farker1]

it hit me

[monkeyfun14]

God damn what is it with email companies and downtime this month.

[glaven123]

Hmmm. Gmail must stil be in beta or something. I can't believe people trust a free beta solution with their communication.

[cusoman]

Complain only when you are paying for the service.

Gmail is free and you know you get what you pay for.........

[skillingssucks]

Their downtime is no worse than any paid for service.

[Shankland]

Just because it's free doesn't mean you don't have the right to complain or at least feel dissatisfied. Google wants you as a member, for Gmail and many other services, and Google places ads next to your e-mail messages. You may not have a service level agreement with the free version of Gmail, but that doesn't exonerate Google when it goes down. You do have a customer relationship with Google when you're using Gmail.

Watching network TV over the air is free, but that doesn't mean there aren't consequences when it goes down.

[AndrewRich]

It was #gmailfail.

[Shankland]

Ah, yes, that's a second one. I added that to the story. Thanks for the news.

[the_ricochet]

Hit me too. Poo.

[ozziethesaint2570]

is anyone still having problems with this? I still cant get to my account

[graydog111]

I cannot access my Gmail except with Thunderbird. It was down 2 days about the 13th of April and then it quit again about April 18th . This is terrible.

[nttwrs]

It's interesting nobody points out (not just here, but in general) that hotmail has been down LESS than gmail over the past year, or the fact that hotmail, strictly when you're talking about moving through the inbox and initial load-up time, is now faster, cleaner (using adblock in ff), and simpler than the bogged-down-with-cool-features (albeit still fast) gmail. Yet, when hotmail did actually go down a couple of weeks ago, all the comments / blogs were screaming "gmail, this is why i use gmail!". And, just FYI, I love both gmail and hotmail.

[monkeyfun14]

Because hotmail is made by MS every MS hater has to find a reason to attack the company. MS could stop world hunger and you would still have people saying MS was copying off of someone.

Hey Stephen, I can not believe that you are still allowed to post your articles after your recent debacle commenting on the Internet Explorer 8. No wonder there are fewer comments this time.. Is some one reading these comments at Cnet.com ????

[slecalvez]

Gmail definitely fails more than hotmail... that's been true this year.

[pops-people]

Comcast, Yahoo Mail, and Microsoft's Hotmail... and now GMail... in a single month? I work in the business so I know that weird coincidences happen all the time; It's what makes the job interesting and fun (Iin a typically sick-and-twisted way). However, I also know that too many coincidental "accidents" usually means that there is something going wrong that should be looked at. It's not that hosted email systems went down (happens all the time) - but for that many to go down in a single month?

Anyone else think this a little odd?

Then again, maybe I should trade in my Stetson and get fitted for a Tin-foil helmet and start circling random letters in the bible looking for the code that is obviously there ;)

[web hosting india]

Since its free so don't expect its to be 100% flawless :)
But still its of a good value to users..
http://www.freeuniquearticles.com/

[yacahuma]

I use my gmail account everyday. And what you get for free is amazing. As a programmer is good to see that this guys are real humans that face the same problems (at a larger scale) than us. I know the pain and suffering of trying to fix something as soon as possible. People have to understand that computers fail, hardwire fails, network fails, etc, etc. Is just the way it is. Maybe Hotmail has less problems, because it has less users. I dont know. Maybe is the stupid spammers overloading communication. In any case Google keep up the good work.

[mcepat]

@yacahuma

"Maybe Hotmail has less problems, because it has less users"

heehee thats funny GMail: 51Million users compared to Hotmail: 228Million users

Hotmail is fast, clean and the ui and functionality blows away gmail in every aspect, thats why 228 million people use it everyday, and as far as downtime compared to gmail its rock solid

gmail always looks like a little kid wrote it with no style, actually anything google does looks childish and not completely finished

yup ms fanboy comment, but numbers and downtime are real and a fact

[nattybumpo12]

Hit me, only for a bout a minute a so. Troublesome because I was in the middle of a chat. It's been pretty flaky when I start it up, but it is still in beta, just like most of google's products.

[ourconvo]

our app email was down for about an hour yesterday :( i have offline for my personal email but the inbox looked screwed up in firefox on my app email if i had offine enabled so it was not a save. i ended up making my app email offline available on Chrome.

[mastavic]

The downtime hit me last time, and - guess what? - Gmail is down for me again. It went down about 15 minutes ago and hasn't come back up yet.

Today, 8th of May 2009, Gmail is experiencing a new outage for some users. See also message at http://news.google.nl/news/url?sa=t&ct2=nl_nl%2F0_0_s_0_0_t&usg=AFQjCNFwVS56wDT4KKaSNtH4qj7S3nfgJQ&cid=0&ei=WggESqDFHc3UjAeDqcnmAQ&rt=SEARCH&vm=STANDARD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmybroadband.co.za%2Fnews%2FInternet%2F7969.html .