Having a cow over Gmail just misses the point
A big outage at Google Tuesday. Things go dark early while most of the U.S. is sleeping. Still, the Internet is without borders and so the glitch leaves millions of people who use Google Web mail and Google Apps, high and dry.
It was mild melodrama for a few hours but things returned to normal after a few hours. It's still unclear what happened, though Google says it's investigating the problem.
Truth be told, the walls of Jericho did not crumble, though the outage nonetheless triggered the (now thoroughly predictable) hand-wringing and bloviating from the usual cast of characters. Amusing to watch, but after this incident, there's also the wider context to consider.
Any outages are embarrassing. But while Gmail did crash a few times in 2008, this is the first time the service has gone down in quite a while. (As my colleague Stephen Shankland noted, Google extends a guarantee to corporate customers paying for any of its business Apps services, which rely on the cloud. The promise: they will be able to access Gmail at least 99.9 percent of the time every month. If not, Google pays them a penalty fee. So far Google says it hasn't fallen below that mark.)
If these sorts of outages occurred with more regularity, I suppose that would seriously retard cloud computing's growth. Google and Salesforce.com and Amazon and any other purveyors of cloud-based services obviously cringe when their connections fail. Not to underplay the anguish customers and vendors find themselves dealing with, but the real news here is how rare these cloud-computing outages have become.
A few years ago it seemed that eBay's Web site was seizing up all of the time. The reality was less severe but merchants and bidders would scream bloody murder. At the same time, eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, and Buy.com were dealing with repeated denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Things got so bad that some even feared for the future of e-commerce.
We now know how the story turned out. Fact is that there are no 100 percent guarantees anymore, not in a world in which applications increasingly get hosted on the Internet. When things go bump in the night, as they inevitably will, there is going to be a commotion, albeit a temporary one. Get over it, already.
This is computing, after all.
Charles Cooper has covered technology and business for more than 25 years. Before joining CNET News, he worked at the Associated Press, Computer & Software News, Computer Shopper, PC Week, and ZDNet. E-mail Charlie. 
Do you by any chance own stock in Google?
How about if instead we compare gmail to the alternatives. If there are better alternatives that suit an individual's requirements, go there. If not, maybe then get over it until a better alternative comes up.
Reliability is always a serious concern when selecting services. And just as if your car inexplicably stopped for a couple hours, yes it's not the end of the world, but you might want to understand why it stopped and decide whether or not the problem is indicative of a more serious concern.
The only people missing the point would be the ones who regard all problems as "that's life". Just because the car starts back up again doesn't mean everything is A-OK.
Contrary to popular belief in the USA, the world does NOT revolve around the USA!
There are other parts of the world, thank you, where life does exist and when GMAIL goes down in the middle of the USA night it is daylight and business time where we live.
Please learn some geography and that the once almighty USA has taken a huge stumble and that perhaps may never recover to try to rule the world again.
Think big for a change
Thanks for listening to my cow story
An American no longer living in the USA.
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A few more points about the scope of the outage to put things in perspective.
While the web UI to Gmail was down, IMAP access was just fine. We could send and receive email on our Blackberry and iPhone devices.
The email notification features of other Google Apps, including Calendar and Sites invitiations and change notices were unaffected. We were able to manage our schedules and collaborate with clients.
Regards,
Allen
I'm not screaming about anything right now but I know that I have to get work done and I have to find ways to make that possible. "Best effort" usually turns out to be some provider's worst effort.
To get work done, I need my desktop/notebook, home network, broadband access, applications, and voice service to function. All of them. At the same time. If each is performing at 99.9%, that's about 40 minutes a month per service and nearly 200 minutes (three hours) of downtime each month.
So it's up to me, not Google, not our beeswax buddy, to decide if Google is reliable enough for my apps. And it's also OK for me to remind Google, very forcefully, that a three-hour outage is not acceptable for a business-class service.
Then I can vote with my feet. I think it's along the lines of scream twice then leave when I find something better. But I retain the right to scream twice. Because it is my freakin' life and not yours.
I pay for my ISP too but there are times when the service has been down, then I couldn't get email or anything else. Any service can go down, even the electricity for God's sake. Hard drives fail, so does software. Nothing is perfect and no one I've ever heard of has a 100% working rate. So it's just a suggestion but you might want to have a workaround plan for when things go sideways. All these folks screaming sound like four year olds pitching a temper tantrum in the toy isle. The name of the game is to find a workable solution to use when a service interruption occurs, not stand there and scream about it.
Gmail has been a lot more dependable than Hotmail ever was, or Yahoo for that matter. I was always having problems with those two email carriers. And Yahoo still doesn't deliver email in a timely fashion. Hotmail isn't secure enough, and for a free email service GMail meets my needs fabulously.
If you pay for email, then that's between you and them.
So be my guest find something more reliable and let the rest of us know when you find it. And you can scream all you like, but that doesn't mean the rest of us should have to listen. If you pay for email service then wail to them, we can't do a thing about it, and I highly doubt it's going to be very effective in addressing your gripes. And as far as hotfooting it to another service I guess that applies to flights as well. Have you discovered a new way of travel perhaps, because air carriers are notoriously unreliable, and have caused me to miss more meetings than any email service ever has. But dang it people still take flights every day with all the major airlines. And flights are much more expensive than email services.
Yeah it's your freakin' life, and not mine, so how about being responsible enough to find a way to handle the inevitable infrequent outage of service, instead of throwing a fit.
- by purpleLightning February 27, 2009 12:49 PM PST
- I doesn't appear to be Mr. Cooper's intent to berate legitimate Google customers who might have been affected by this incident. The "hand-wringing" he refers to is that which come from a wider audience of outsiders looking in, trying to inflate this into a bigger issue about the prospects of cloud computing. But as Mr. Cooper points out, that really shouldn't be done from the perspective of this single incident,
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(18 Comments)but rather the wider context of overall cloud computing reliability and improvements in recent years.