Gmail Down!
Sarah Perez on January 17th, 2007
It’s 7 PM EST and my Gmail has been down for at least 30 minutes (as far as I know). It’s moments like this that remind me that when you use a free, web-based product, as amazing as it may be, you are at the mercy of the service provider. As we move towards more of a webOS, software-as-a-service world, we need to remember to pick those services wisely. If you were using Gmail for your domain, would this be an acceptable downtime for your business? What if you went with Google Docs&Spreadsheets instead of M$ Office and it went down?
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You make some good points, but a half an hour downtime to me does not seem like that big of a deal.
And, umm, I have been checking my gmail four or five tomes throughout the day and it has been fine.
There have been several cases where Gmail users have lost all of their emails and Google’s response was “sorry, nothing we can do to recover the data”.
After hearing that it would scare me to death to depend on someone else with my important data (email or whatever).
Hey Veign. Try hosting your own email sometime.
30 minutes of downtime wouldn’t sway me a bit. I still LOVE my gmail! It was down for me for just about 5 seconds.
I have spend some time on Gmail Help Forum, and 90% of the problems are to do with the URL (or a cache problem in Firefox); do you type:
http://mail.google.com
GMail’s URL is
https://mail.google.com
Same problem for Google Calendar. Microsft has been blamed (with reason) for not forcing users into the most secure solution.
Frankie, I do. I have my own server. Its the only way to go. Freedom to do what you want.
Half and hour, well in my life time I’ve experienced local powerlines that came down because a driver hit a pole and that took more than half an hour to repair. Along with the power outages that occured because of work crews and weather including blown fuses - it really does not seem too bad.
The business I was involved in depended on consistent power - we had 5 private radio systems and computers and electronic telephones we took 2050 phone calls a day and dispatched 600 drivers - yea, when it happened we freeked but looking back on it today I would take an occassional 30 minute shut down any day as compare to the many multi hour shut downs we indured over the years.
A week ago, Google Blogger has been down for at least 3 hours… I think they are having some problems…
30 minutes ain’t bad. Our mail server at work goes down all the time.
I’ve been unable to access my gmail for 12 hours! That is a long time!
it’s been down for 12 hours for me too. Surprisingly, when I access my business account (only 10MB of storage space used) there were no problems. My personal account on the other hand, with 530MB of data, has been down for 12 hours
I’m glad I’m not the only one with this issue at this moment. I’ve been unable to access Gmail for about 12 hours, as well. I just submitted a bug report to Google, hoping that they’ll fix it. It would seem that some accounts are affected and some are not (my “alternate” Gmail account seems to work, but my main one seems to be down).
“but a half an hour downtime to me does not seem like that big of a deal.”
Well, you’re mistaken.
“30 minutes of downtime wouldn’t sway me a bit.”
When you become more important, you’ll see the need to not become incommunicado for hours on end.
“30 minutes ain’t bad. Our mail server at work goes down all the time.”
Find new employment. 30 minutes of downtime for mission critical work is laughably unacceptable. And so is 12 hours, which is what it is at this point.
My primary account’s been down for the past 5 hours too
(I’m in India, and it’s 20:00 GMT March 1at the moment)
A couple of other accounts are fine; and most of my friends’ accounts work fine.
I’ve been down since 10AM EST while my secondary gmail box is working as are all my friends. I’ve sent them notes, and once they replied saying it was because I had abused the system. But I emailed them back saying that was nuts, and Google conceded that there is a server issue and they’re working to fix the problem. Sheesh.
Gmail Website Down ? Get your mails anyway
We had some reports coming in about some outages of the gmail - that is google mail - web interface which meant that some users could not access their mail accounts for several hours which seems to be a big problem for at least some of those users. In …
Mine has been down a lot longer than 30 minutes. More like six hours now. It’s kind of a pain to keep seeing that message “try logging in again in a few minutes”. Yeah, yeah…I know it’s free and you get what you pay for, but it is a minor pain in the butt. What’s interesting is that both my car and my external hard drive also stopped working today. Maybe I broke Gmail. Sorry everybody! At least I don’t have to pay to fix Gmail. I just have to wait…