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.

Agreed
you need to contact somebody....pick up the damn phone.
Yup
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
DID someone say lawsuit? lol jk.
Anyways no i didn't have a problem with my gmail.
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.
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.
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.