Gmail Goes Down for Halloween
Gmail users experience service issues throughout the weekend.
We had a very happy Halloween but the candy-filled festivities were slightly marred by a Gmail outage that saw a some users without service for much of the weekend.
While Google now says that the number of users affected was less than 0.001 percent, that assurance did not come until nearly 7 p.m. on Sunday. Most affected users began to experience problems on Saturday, and according to complaints noted by PC Pro, some of these problems lasted "more than 30 hours," with emails to Google going unanswered.
Despite Google claiming that this outage has affected only a very small number of people, it seems users are more annoyed with the lack of support than the problem itself. UberGizmo reports that people who paid for 24/7 phone support were unable to contact Google’s phone support. These people are understandably upset, given that they're forking over $50 a year to make sure they can get support over the phone when they need it.
"I'm in London, have had no access now for roughly past 24hrs," claimed one user, according to PC Pro. "Have filled in a support form to Google with an alternate email for them to contact me on but no reply yet. This is really bad! I urgently need to access my mail for work now."
Did you have any problems with your Gmail over the weekend? If so, let us know if you contacted Google and if the company got back to you.
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Everyone makes a mistake. Move along.
Guess I shouldn't have toilet-papered that server.....
Exactly. It happens- move on.
Good for Google...Nobody is perfect so stop pretending to be one. Move on.
^^
Agreed
No, this isn't a "It happens-move on" situation! Google didn't hold up their end of a paid service. Many business users may be able to quantify losses due to their downtime and put a price tag on it. Since Goggle didn't bother to provide the tech support their customers pay a premium for, the situation could be open for expensive lawsuits. Google is going to be very careful with regards to what they say about the indecent.
it's only email. get over it.
you need to contact somebody....pick up the damn phone.
^^
Yup
hmm, not sensible relying on a free email (or any emial for that matter) service for work if its that urgent (it was the weekend right?). Email goes down at peoples places of work all the time, this doesn't suddenly stop a business being able to run, and if it does they need to seriously consider their OP's and perhaps pay a bigger premium for more surety of service (seriously $50 a year is piss all if you business depends on something, it's hardly a 'premium' service from a business point of view)...
30 hours - 8 of which people would have been asleep for, hopefully at least 4 hours eating, taking a dump, etc etc. There's something wrong with the world if not having email access for 18 hours over the weekend is a disaster
No, this isn't a "It happens-move on" situation! Google didn't hold up their end of a paid service. Many business users may be able to quantify losses due to their downtime and put a price tag on it. Since Goggle didn't bother to provide the tech support their customers pay a premium for, the situation could be open for expensive lawsuits. Google is going to be very careful with regards to what they say about the indecent.
DID someone say lawsuit? lol jk.
Anyways no i didn't have a problem with my gmail.
I had problems during the day accessing it, but I switched to HTML mode and it worked fine.
In real life I am an email administrator for a very large corporation. Have worked at many Fortune 100 companies in the same position.
I understand the importance of email in the world. I understand the importance of it when used in a business sense. I have servers crash just to spite you and I get to hear the whining, whining, whining of the end user about the damn email being down (or running slow because it's failed over to a redundant server)
Yes there is a necessity for instant electronic distribution of files but from experience on the front line I can promise that 99% of the time the whining is not business related.
This is gmail. If your business is running on gmail then I feel sorry for you. Do not ever trust a business critical application to a business that made their money on offering low-budget free email service.
Honestly...what could possibly be in gmail that would justify someone throwing a fit if it was down? Couldn't send out your drunken Halloween photos? As I stated earlier...if contact with someone was so critical over the weekend then call them. Everyone has a stupid cell phone now so it's not like its hard to track someone down.
$50/year is just an overly dramatic way of saying "Less than $5/month". What exactly is it about free web based email that people feel the need to "pay" for support? No, I didn't have any problems with my gmail account, and I wouldn't sweat it if I did. If I really needed my email that bad, I'd have my own exchange server.
Google intentionally does things like this on major holidays, especially on Halloween. It's Google's way of freaking people out.
It was Google's way of Trick or Treatin' you. I guess you get what you pay for (or not if your forked over $50/year to be told "yup, its down and we are working on it. You will know it is up when you can get back on."
I had problems during the day accessing it, but I switched to HTML mode and it worked fine.
Yeah, same here yesterday.
I thought it was a problem with Java on my end until I read this. Annoying, but not a big deal for me since I could get to my inbox.
yet more proof that cloud computing is a way off yet. when one of the biggest data management companies can't even keep email online consistently...
Not all of gmail is free. Business accounts are $50 PER USER PER YEAR. I've been looking at getting my company to move over to this service. Unlike normal gmail, there are no ads and you get 25 GB per users instead of 7, which for our company is big since we send a lot of files over e-mail.
Downtime happens. It isn't about that. It is about not having open communications with the end users who are paying a pretty penny for said support.