Gmail was down | Hacker News Reader

Gmail was down

gmail.com

102 pointssaiko-chriskun83 comments

Haha, I have been selling my boss on switching us over to google apps for around A YEAR.

We've been gradually moving accounts over over the last couple of weeks, and I finally walked into his office today and asked him if I could set up his phone and stuff on the new google apps.

"errr....surree, I don't know are you sure this thing works?"

"YES! It's freaking google! It's awesome!"

So I set up his outlook, and his phone...

and as soon as he went to open "exchange" on his iPhone...gmail bites it.

DAMNIT!!!

"I don't know about this google, thing, blhack..."

I just switched a client over to Google Apps for Domains from a previous e-mail provider due to the downtime issues they were experiencing there. :'( Shoot me now.

This is the exact opposite of my experience. I've started to hate google apps with a passion.

The support is limited and the thing is just so opaque. The settings interface is difficult and confusing, postini is even worse.

I've applied settings to stuff in postini in the past that has completely failed to take effect, such as whitelisting specific IP addresses.

Give me an exchange box, or even just postfix+dovecot any day.

We're actually moving away from postfix+courier. I DO love the ability to just tail /var/log/maillog and immediately see just about any problem, but we've been self-hosting it, and have outgrown it to the point where its time for me to either pass the project on to somebody else, or move to something like GA.

Postini setup process and support are a joke. You can call someone who tells you to look at a help file, and the help files point to help files, which have no screenshots, and reference menu and navigation options that don't exist. Also asking them how to get Postini to work with Google Apps was like speaking a foreign language to them, as if we were the first person to need this. Despite the fact that it was up-sold to us as an add-on to Google Apps.

Other than Postini, though, I do like Google Apps.

"Show detailed technical info"

Oh, okay. Maybe this will explain something.

"Numeric Code: 5"

... that explains everything!

ha, I thought the same thing...then tried to Google it and only got results leading to google forums which are also down.

Google apps gives a 502, along with a helpful:

"502. That’s an error.

The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request.

Please try again in 30 seconds. That’s all we know."

Oh, Twitter: Gmail down 5:46-5:49pm ET 10/31/12 #neverforget

It's working for me.

Reader & youtube are down, too. (Reader throws a 401, http://www.checkupdown.com/status/E401.html)

Aaaaaand gmail/youtube are back up!

YouTube is down as well

.... aaaannnddd it's back - what the heck happened?

  $ google-cluster run-parallel 'rm -rf /'

$ sudo service nginx restart

Configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test failed.

... shit.

$ sudo nginx -t

If all is good:

$ sudo nginx -s reload

restart is nice, but I'd rather -t first!

GOOGLE is down. Like, ALL of it.

Search is still working for me.

Yeah, except for search (so including reader, calendar, gmail, docs, ...) but it's already back up.

This includes Google Voice, apparently. I can't send or receive texts or calls at the moment.

Shortest downtime ever?

I had just gone for coffee and looks like I missed it!

Maybe shortest, but with largest number of people affected by it, at least according to the comments here.

Even google apps status dashboard is down (http://www.google.com/appsstatus). Where's status status page?

I just visited that status page, and all services are reported as green, as in "No Issues". Seems like their server failure detection system didn't quite detected the failures.

We need server failure detection system failure detection system then.

Exam due tomorrow. Not the time to be using google docs! :(

It's back up, and now I'm seeing the new message Compose window (yay). Sounds inconceivable, but perhaps the push required some kind of downtime?

No, I got prompted for that about 1pm GMT (9hrs ago) for all of my accounts.

'Not now'. What a bunch of crap. New 'windows' in a browser suck all kinds of ass. You'd think they'd learnt this when we all did 5 years ago.

I like it. It's not a new window, it just stays on top – making it better (for me) than either 1) saving as a draft, then looking through old mail to find content for the new message, then finding the draft and completing the message, or 2) opening the new message in a "real" new window which then needs attended to. Also like the recipients' pics, which makes it harder to send to an unintended recipient.

No, I had the new compose window about 12 hours ago, yet I still had downtime a few minutes ago. I'm not saying the downtime wasn't somehow related to these changes, but downtime does not appear to be a necessary or intentional part of the rollout.

Was it shorter than 5 minutes?

Just about... Google Voice was giving me a generic 500 Internal Server Error page for a few minutes as well but it looks like it's back now.

That's a reasonable time to be down IMHO.

Unexpected loss of service is reasonable? I don't think so ... unavoidable I would give you.

Since, it's unavoidable, whenever it happens, if it happens for less than 5 minutes it's a good thing.

Status page updated (http://www.google.com/appsstatus):

'We believe about 10% of Google users experienced difficulties reaching Google for six minutes this afternoon starting at approximately 2:41pm PT. We apologize to everyone affected and have worked hard to get our services back to normal as quickly as possible.'

Google announced some changes to Gmail¹, so that wasn't as big a surprise. The other services being down... I dunno.

[¹]http://gmailblog.blogspot.ca/2012/10/introducing-new-compose...

Seems like anything that depends on personalization, including Apps for Domains, is down. I'm glad it fails in a way which lets google search keep working even if the login process is messed up, at least.

youtube and docs/drive down, too.

https://play.google.com : Down

"We're sorry, there was an error. Please try again later."

Yea, its a bit scary when gmail goes down huh? Regular Gmail, google apps for your domain and youtube are down for me. Google search is not.

44 comments, 73 points all in 7 minutes - hot topic!

I don't think I've ever seen anything explode like this did.

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/google.com

What was the downtime? Wonder if we'll get a post-mortem of what happened and how they resolved it so damn fast.

Ah, I was wondering why Postbox complained that it couldn't login to any of my several Google Apps accounts.

Google Voice down from here (Manhattan).

For gmail, I clicked on "Detailed Technical Info" and got "Numeric code: 5" ... didn't help much :-)

Google account is down. So everything need login information does not work now.

Gmail and YouTube are working for me, but Google Drive is still dead.

And now Drive is back up. Essays saved!

Worked fine here for the last hours, maybe not down in europe?

back up http://www.businessinsider.com/gmail-down-2012-10

Gmail, Youtube, Drive, etc. are working in Oregon.

One of my app engine applications is down too.

Up again. Was throwing Google-branded 502 errors for about 3-4 minutes.

Google works for me... Gmail still down.

google fonts api was down for me... but wait... it seems to be back up. my gmail seems to be back now too

For me everything is up, even Gmail.

Does this mean I get to take a nap?

Works for me.

Possibly caching? Try a hard reset (if you dare!)

Works for me too. (I am from Hungary, maybe this matters?)

I had 502s on Youtube from Germany.

GMail working fine for me (UK)

Working fine here too (Swizerland). Is it only in the US ?

Went down for me in the UK also.

I'm 100% back online

Works fine for me...

Youtube is back up

Gmail is up now.

Back up for me!

its working again.

gmail is back up!

calendar as well

why are you accelerating the outage?

It probably didn't go down because of traffic.

up again.

Agree & it was down briefly

I wonder if the next thing will be an email from Google saying "if you don't want us to turn off your Google again, send us $(calculated-amount-you-will-probably-pay). That $ value is pretty high, far higher than their current revenue from me (adblocking...).

Money does not make storms go away, so that's very unlikely.

I don't think it was storm related. Google routinely takes down entire datacenters without affecting user visible services. It's some config or software error which either got fixed or rolled back really quickly.

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