Mountain View, California — Not being able to access your email is more annoying than amusing. Google and its e-mail users had a rude awakening Tuesday morning, with Gmail experiencing a major outage between 4:30 a.m. until 7:00 a.m. EST (or from 9:30 a.m. till noon for countries on Greenwich Mean Time). But question thus far remained unanswered over what went wrong. The search titan has apologised for the outage saying it is now “investigating the root cause” of the issue that marked sixth downtime in eight months, affecting business and consumer users of its popular e-mail service.
It is more than just Gmail, as Google Apps users in the UK and elsewhere this morning could not sign on. Tuesday’s Gmail breakdown for hours overnight, one of the longest e-mail outages for the search giant, left users seeing only a “502 server error” page when trying to login to the Web-based system.
Google posted a warning on their main blog at around 4:28 a.m. PST saying they are experiencing a problem and they were working on it. A few hours later they posted a follow up to say that everything was alright (And you may need to use a CAPTCHA because of all of your failed login attempts).
“We know the fact that for many of you this disrupted your working day. We are really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could,” Gmail Site Reliability Manager Acacio Cruz stated in the Official Google Blog.
“Obviously we are never happy when outages occur, but we would like to stress that this is an unusual occurrence,” he added.
More than 113 million people use Google mail worldwide, according to comScore.
Gmail is the third most popular e-mail service, with an estimated 113 million users, who were compelled to resort to Google’s new offline mode, introduced last month, a number of Google service users were also forced to wait, since Gmail also serves as the company’s central source of service authentication.
Word of the breakdown spread quickly via Twitter and hardly took the time to hit the tech blogs, where it was quickly dubbed as “the great Gmail outage of 2009.” Some unofficial reports indicated the outage lasted as long as four hours. Google says it was only about two-and-a-half.
The breakdown occurred at the worst possible time for users in Western Europe, including Great Britain, where users were just getting settled to work. Google Apps can work offline, though the degree of offline functionality they offer has only been increasing in small steps.
More than a million business around the world use Google’s professional suite of applications, including e-mail. Nevertheless, the outage came about in the middle of the night, but the disruption was disastrous for all alike. Google itself depend on the service and press spokespeople for the firm were unable to e-mail journalists with statements regarding the problem.
Professional users are covered by a service level agreement for businesses specifies that Gmail and Google’s other services will be 99.9% operational in any calendar month.
The “Premier Edition” of the Apps service costs $50 (£34) per user for a year. In general, Google’s reputation for dependability for Gmail is high. The company stated that it only had an average of 10 to 15 minutes of downtime last year, with the biggest one being an outage of several hours in August.
Laura DiDio, an analyst with Information Technology Intelligence Corps, said both consumer and business users of Gmail will “feel the pain during an outage like this.” But, she added, that pain will dissipate until the next time.
“And, if you are Google,” she said, “you of course need to make sure there are not too many more ‘next times.’”
If it is continuing and regular, DiDio noted, it could have an impact on the acceptance of Gmail and Google Apps among consumers and businesses, particularly since both have a variety of aggressive competitors.
The breakdown could also mean a refund for Google’s business customers. Google postings said Gmail had “some problems,” and an analyst said Google needs to correct them.
Google announced Tuesday afternoon that paying customers for its Google Apps who suffered from this morning’s outage — which is now believed to have prolonged over two hours for some customers — are being offered a 15-day usage credit. The company has yet to announce how that offer is being made, although there was no obvious way for individuals to apply for that credit as of Tuesday evening.
Previous Gmail Outages:
During the last six months, Gmail has sustained some or the other form of downtime on five separate occasions before this week’s incident:
- July 16, 2008: A similar “502 error” struck Gmail, leading to what was depicted as a “long outage” by affected users.
- August 6, 2008: Technical jumble knocked an “undetermined number” of Gmail users (including both regular users and paying Google Apps clients) out of their mail for about 15 hours.
- August 11, 2008: An issue with Google’s “contacts system” made Gmail access to go offline for a “couple of hours” for numerous users. Both individual accounts and Google Apps accounts were affected again.
- August 15, 2008: The third outage within a span of two weeks left users locked out of their accounts for more than 24 hours. That pesky “502 server error” popped up on the Gmail login page here, too.
- October 16, 2008: Users went a full 30 hours without access. Google did not elaborate on what caused the issue.
Meanwhile, Twitter users have been thrashing around the term “Gfail” to such a degree that it is becoming a fresh new keyword among search engines.