[Gmail] The September 1 Outage

All companies have outages here and there and we've all gotten a little used to that. Twitter has it's share of fail whale sightings while Multiply has it's unexpected maintenance windows and even Facebook Apps like Mafia Wars have their periods of unavailability. Then you get the big boys like Google and such outages tend to attract a lot more media attention given the high profile nature of the company.

Gmail went down earlier sometime after midnight locally but pretty much early morning in the US. Given I don't have install rights at the office, I was unable to access the offline mode of Gmail via Google Gears and was left staring at a default message stating Gmail was temporarily unavailable. I know, the horror of no access to Gmail.

The Official Gmail Blog now reports that it was apparently caused by overloaded request routers, and I can certainly see how that might have happened. Naturally this has lead to a renewed series of posts about the viability of cloud computing and how secure such data is but frankly I'm pretty sick and tired of that kind of talk and wish that they'd just appreciate how quickly Google turned things around.

Tips for the future for all you geeky readers include (1) ensuring you have offline Gmail enabled so you can still access your email, (2) activating IMAP / POP access so you can try to connect to Gmail in alternate ways (given IMAP / POP access was still relatively working during the outage) and (3) keeping regular tabs on the status of all Google Apps so you know whether it's an offiial outage or not.

[Google] The May 14 Outage

Image via Wikipedia

I was busy finishing a blog entry a little before midnight when it happened - I had run a routine Google search on "madeline pastry" since I wanted to verify how it was spelled when my search window timed out. How odd. I almost noticed my Gmail when into "offline" mode, so I figured something was wrong with our internet connection. I checked with my friend and he said he was still connected, but we tried rebooting the router just in case.

No dice. I was still disconnected from Gmail, my Google searches weren't running and Google Reader was not refreshing either. Oh, and Pidgin could no longer connect to Google Talk.

Cue mild panic now.

A Google outage is pretty rare, but of course it's bound to happen sooner or later. Unfortunately, it does act as a startling reminder of just how dependent many of us are on Google for many services. Isolated outages of individual products aren't so bad since that's only a subset of the total population of Google users, but when pretty much the entire Google network goes down, a large chuck of the web goes down with it.

During major web "events" like this, it's always amusing to jump over to Twitter to see how people are reacting. A casual search of the #gmail, #google or #googlefail hash tags got me hundreds upon hundreds of reports about the outage, but not much else in terms of actually useful information. Heck, the worse are those classic Twitter messages along the lines of "if you can't access #google, retweet this post" and it's never ending echoes around the web. It's no surprise some folks have actually written about the silly, non-essential role Twitter plays in times like this.

I have a lot of my life invested in Google's portion of the "cloud", I have to admit. I route all my email through Gmail and I collate all my RSS feeds via Google Reader. I schedule events and reminders on Google Calendar and I maintain a decent number of friends on Google Talk. This blog is on the Blogger platform, my domain is supported by Google Apps and my RSS feed is run by FeedBurner (now a Google product). I run AdSense programs, AdWords advertising campaigns and I study all this through Google Analytics. I manage two wikis via Google Sites, I get updated via Google News and I even have a few Google Alerts set to notify of key updates. I maintain a number of documents and spreadsheets on Google Docs, manage a few email lists via Google Groups and I still have some leftover stuff on Google Notebook. Don't forget watching videos on YouTube and even maintaining links on Google Bookmarks! The list goes on and on...

So yeah, a Google outage is a near catastrophe for me. I'm like Google's primary demographic and it just kills me when any of these services go down, what more all of them.

I almost wasn't able to finish that blog entry - it seemed odd not to be able to search for terms to be used in the entry or to get interest web comics to share from Google Reader. Despite the loss of a major part of my internet life, I pushed on, finished the entry and waited for Google to come back. Yes, I was going through Google withdrawal.

In about an hour it did, and the world was restored to equilibrium. I could finally sleep easy knowing things were more or less back to normal. Google's official statement was as vague as always but CNET's WebWare came up with a pretty comprehensive post-mortem report on precisely what happened.

While I doubt this outage is going to make me abdandon Google for the likes of (gasps) Yahoo anytime soon, it is a bit disturbing how dependent I, and perhaps may others, have become on Google's many web services. While it was funny to read some of the Twitter messages about the Google outage meaning the end of the internet a as a whole, it was also somewhat scary since it almost felt true.

[Google] Birthday Messages

First of all, let's give Google a big and hearty

Happy Birthday!!!

This is Google's eighth year and it seems hard to imagine life without them anymore. Just look at the effects of the current outage in the US being experienced by some ComCast users and this gives you the significant importance Google plays in our modern lives.

Interestingly enough, Google released an interesting statement on the Official Google Blog regarding the nature of their business philosophy. As I've also discussed in previous entries, Google focuses on helping users find content relevant to them as opposed to being an independent content provider similar to companies like Yahoo.

Of course the statement is related to their recent troubles in Belgium, but it also comes across as a very strong statement to other competitors in the search field. Google remains dedicated to search and has no immediate plans of moving into the content arena, and personally I don't think they should.

They're already the best at what they do, and their continued developments only work to help ensure they remain on top.