Google, Gmail experiencing downtime worldwide | Hacker News Reader

Google, Gmail experiencing downtime worldwide

thenextweb.com

130 pointsmgcreed77 comments

http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en

I actually like that they give a specific time to expect the next update down to the minute

"We're aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 4:53:00 PM UTC-4 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change."

This is one of those things that is extremely helpful for a sysadmin taking heat from employees looking for answers.

Gmail is back.

US date order always makes me laugh - it's like people looked at date order and thought if the day comes before the month that will be the European way, lets flip it. Then they realised that would be YYYY-mm-dd and so be ISO standard order, dang can't have that, hey lets have a mixture.

I know it didn't happen this way but some sort of logical order would be good.

The order is logical, it maps to the way many americans speak. E.g. July 4th, 2000, which is always spoken as ... er... the 4th of july, 2009. Well. uh. Bad example.

A logical justification could be found for any order. It's just arbitrary.

It would be good to hear a logical justification for the mm-dd-yyyy. I'm not sure I can come up with one. It makes it hard to search and it doesn't follow any sequential order. yyyy-mm-dd actually goes up by one each day. Try it next time you have to number give files a date stamp and you'll find it makes your life a lot simpler.

Of course I meant a justification for the mixed up ordering as being of greater utility (more easily parsed, understood, less confused, more easily read, better sorted, more standardised with other users) than the other common orderings.

Let the word go forth ... your logical justification please?

I've taken to writing %d %b %Y when possible. It's unambiguous and provides sane ordering. And somehow I find it easier to map from %b to an ordinal than vice versa.

Thats: %d - 2 digit day number by month; %b - 3 letter month name; %Y - 4 digit year CE; for those who don't recall so well.

Interestingly, GMail has failed twice in the last few weeks since they removed it from beta. Before that, I can only remember one large-scale outage over the previous few years.

Sometimes its pretty nice to be the end user of a big problem.

I feel sorry for those poor sysadmins

All those articles warning against having all your data in the cloud are coming to mind. On the bright side, without email, there's temporarily one less distraction to worry about. http://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html

second that. And now techcrunch down too.

http://www.techcrunch.com/ doesn't seems to be down :-/

But if you stored it locally you would still have downtime. Downtime (problems) are inevitable. It's just that only you would notice, so it might not get on the news.

I doubt the actual uptime would be that different for any one person.

The difference is that you can know what's wrong and fix it (assuming you're able). Also, over the past 2+ years, my mail server has had less downtime than GMail, and any outages were easy for me to diagnose and fix. I like feeling in control over critical pieces of my business (at least as much as possible - I'm in no position to build my own DC for instance).

Google is a better sysadmin than I am. I assume most people are in the same boat.

I know google hires some people who are better than me, but that doesn't mean the gmail system is better than something I could engineer.... For one thing, google needs to have a much lower cost per user than I do, forcing them to make some choices that I don't have to. I have no problem paying $50 a month for email service, and that level of cost per user would be untenable on a free email service. (I host most of my email myself, and I'm trading a free co-lo to mark perkel of junkemailfilter.com to do my filtering. between that and my time, I'd guess $50/month)

This is true, but also very unfortunate, as GMail is often a poor substitute for a well-administered in-house e-mail system.

Running a mail system for 10 people is a lot easier than running one for a few million.

This phrase comes to mind... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgkBpWc8ngI#t=4m18s

Even Google's internal corporate mail is down. Yikes.

And Microsoft and Yahoo employees bust out the champagne :D

Dogfooding Exchange vNext is never fun...

Except for those who secretly use Gmail at home.

And Larry and Sergei only answer their phone after two and a half rings!

See, I can do it, too!

And credit card auth on Android Market it seems.

Just imagine all those lost profits...

i estimate that i'm already out $4, maybe $5 from this

Out of curiosity, what's your app?

Huh. GMail is down for me, but GMail's IMAP is still working. I didn't even notice.

Yeah. I only ever use GMail through IMAP, and then didn’t find this until after it was back up. Never had a clue.

Me too. I'm still getting emails to my phone.

I wonder what the load on that little machine that's spitting out 502's is right now...

I'll give you a hint: It's in Los Angeles...

Coincidentally, their "Go Google" billboard campaign just ended today.

No gmail at work = Its lunchtime for me. Hurray Google for naturally putting me on break!

Ditto. Back to Dino Comics, TED talks, and SICP.

Lol, so true.

Workarounds: GMail gadget for iGoogle ; IMAP/POP3.

It's not all that bad :)

I haven't had an issue all day, till you guys mentioned it :) Down on the east coast 4:02pm

You can login here. https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=mail...

nvm that only gets you the login screen

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

Please try again in 30 seconds.

Yeah, that's down too now. 502 error

http://www.google.com/ig shows me signed-in in chat-mode. Can anyone explain why so ?

GMail at iGoogle is working for me. Edit: It was working. Not anymore.

works for me

iGoogle has the chat feature enabled by default, IIRC. You can shut it off via Options (at the bottom of the widget) > Hide (I think, this is off the top of my head).

Strange, I just did a search for movie show times in my area earlier and just now, and it seems that some cinemas are missing.

The timing lines up exactly with the gmail outage.

Since those theaters have always been listed in the movie showtime search as long as I can remember, this could be part of a larger service outage. What else is down that they aren't telling us?

Wow, I've been lazy in migrating away from Gmail but this motivates me to do so.

Everything goes down sometimes. I've found Gmail to be more stable than most.

Yeah, at least when gmail goes down, everyone knows about it.

I dare you to list a more reliable service with a comparable price.

i'd like to note that i can access gmail through the igoogle gmail widget, and just got, read and responded to a fresh email through it.

can't access gmail through any other means.

thought it might be useful for everyone to know and give it a shot.

Works via iGoogle for me as well, and I've received a couple e-mails from GMail users from their iPhones. So presumably it's just the web front-end that's busted.

Hah just checked HN while waiting for gmail to log me in...

Australia down as well ... was just about to click on an exciting mail when .. pop !! you are now accessing offline mail :(

waits while twiddles thumb

"We will provide an update by September 1, 2009 5:16:00"

Hit refresh at 5:16 and it's back up. That was pretty impressive.

IMAP and POP3 are working fine

Dumb workaround: Forward mail from Iphone IMAP to yahoo account

Just tried. It's back up for me in Washington, DC, USA

Gmail 502 error from San Francisco 12:52 pm PDT.

Same machine is up, 2:32pm PDT

ping mail.xx.com PING ghs.l.google.com (72.14.203.121) 56(84) bytes of data.

Customize URL in Google App/email is broken :(

Back up here in Portland, OR.

Even down here in Pakistan ;(

On the 28th day - we crash.

Back up for me!

Brazil is down

- Darling, do you remember the day when Google was down?

- You mean the day 9 months before our son was born?

===

Enjoy it while it lasts.

502 Server Error

[ $date -u => Tue Sep 1 19:59:05 UTC 2009 ]

#fail

And that is why Google Voice is not a replacement for cell phone service. Take that Arrington!

Actually, GV is working fine.

I think the OP meant outages in general

Exactly. With feigned 'outrage' at Arrington for all his Google Voice love as of late.

Are you suggesting that cell towers never fail?

they do fail, often, in fact, but the difference is that its a decentralized system and several towers being down isn't a big deal, its just a normal day. They contract with many carriers to carry data and often a single cell site is multihosted so any one carrier switches to another provider, who now has them over a barrel so charges them more. Cell tower failures affect the mobile carriers profits, and not necessarily the users service.

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