Google's latest Gmail outage (from 2 p.m. PDT to 4 p.m. PDT Monday) was well documented and, coming less than one week after another major outage of Gmail and Google Apps, the company felt compelled to blog about it in the form of an apology sandwich.
What's an apology sandwich? Well, the first sentence -- the bottom piece of bread -- is an apology.
Todd Jackson, Gmail product manager wrote: "Many of you had trouble accessing Gmail for a couple of hours this afternoon, and we're really sorry."
The next layer is the meat: "The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly. Everything should be back to normal by the time you read this."
The cheese tops the meat in the form of a lot of, well, cheese about how Google has "heard loud and clear today how much people care about their Gmail accounts."
Jackson notes how he and his team read the e-mails to its support team and user group, the litany of Twitter posts and fielded phone calls from Google Apps customers and friends.
Jackson tops the apology sandwich with this piece of bread: "Again, we're sorry."
I'm not sure the apology sandwich works, but I understand it. A lot of small shops don't want to pay for Microsoft Exchange and are using free Gmail instead.
Plenty of smaller media and research companies use Gmail. Ferris Research Group uses Gmail. In the blogosphere, both GigaOm and ReadWriteWeb use Gmail.
Om Malik was particularly flustered by the outage yesterday, so he wrote: "Given that our company relies on Google's Gmail and GTalk service, our operations came to a standstill this afternoon. We aren't a large company but the losses are very real, especially in productivity."
Malik goes on to rightly note that if even Google, which owns a reported 1 million servers, can go down, what company can remain free and clear of outages?
The answer is none. So long as we're relying on a life-sized circuit board of pipes to run our infrastructure, we will likely never see operations of 24/7.
Maybe the better question we need to start asking is not whether the Web as a platform will be totally reliable -- we know it won't -- but whether or not we want to rely entirely on the Web as a platform. And if we do, perhaps we need to get used to some downtime now and then.
What is so disconcerting to me about Google's outage is that it comes during the dead calm of August, traditionally a time when most folks go on vacation. You would think traffic to Gmail and Google Apps would be a little less. I know I didn't touch Google in July when I was on vacation.
What happens if Google Apps and Gmail crash in September?
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Comments (11)
you seem to be a worry wart. every system, no matter how commercial it is, seems to have down time. my car needs downtime, my cellphone discharges, my computer needs an upgraded... for the cost, google is great. i'm not sure that exchange would serve me any better.
Posted by notworried | August 12, 2008 1:59 PM
I'll second what 'notworried' wrote. So GMail was down for two hours? Show me a company who can run their own email systems without downtime? And especially for the price ($50 per user per year or whatever it is for GMail for domains)... And when it does go down, who do you want fixing it? Google, or Bob from IT who will be searching the web for "Exchange BSOD"?
Posted by Brian Madden | August 12, 2008 2:07 PM
This is a very big concern. For a small business that is trying to establish itself, an outage can grind business to a halt and even a couple of hours can break a small business if a deal doesn't get closed because a deadline is missed due to that outage.
Posted by JP | August 12, 2008 2:58 PM
I have NOT experienced a gmail outage ever! Methinks thou dost protest too much.
Posted by Ron Cleaver | August 12, 2008 3:32 PM
Ron:
Obviously you were not using gmail between 2-4 PM PDT Monday...or...well...you would not have been. Because there was an outage.
A better question than "Should businesses rely on the Web, or GMail?" might be "Should businesses expect far more than they pay for when they use essentailly free services (Note the "essentially", quibblers-to-come) to run their operations?"
Posted by Bart | August 13, 2008 10:29 AM
Considering recent news from the Black Hat conference, maybe we should all be feeling a tad nervous. Paranoid. Oh, the h*** with it. I'll just do like I was a kid in school in the 60s and hide under my desk from the friggin' nuclear attack. (The teachers really didn't appreciate it when I told them they were idiots.)
--Glenn
Posted by oregonnerd | August 13, 2008 2:09 PM
Maybe I'm wrong, but if you're trusting your business to a free service then perhaps you've forfeited your right to complain.
Posted by jasmoran66 | August 13, 2008 6:52 PM
If email is mission critical, no matter what you are using, have a backup! With email being the commodity it is, it does not take much to have a failover system. Even small on-a-shoe-string budget companies can do it.
Posted by Frank Muto | August 14, 2008 12:15 PM
i think we forget one thing.... gmail is free. while we all rely on it, you still get what you pay for and need to not put mission critical services on free networks just because they are ubiquitous with the service and reliability that comes with a company like google.
Posted by robert | August 14, 2008 5:24 PM
The sky is falling..the sky is falling...
Come on a 2 hour outage for email is a blip, gmail is still the best. If you are one of the 1% of companies that really have mission critical real time email you shouldn't be using gmail anyway. But of course no one has 100% reliability anyway so whats the point?
Posted by junglej | August 14, 2008 9:06 PM
"What happens if Google Apps and Gmail crash in September?"
Gmail. September 1. Down again.
The sky is, apparently, falling.
Posted by Netsurfer | September 1, 2009 4:55 PM