Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Tuesday 24 February 2009, 10:39 AM
Gmail down - in 36 different languages
Quite.
Meanwhile, Google has said there's a problem for a small subset of users (how small?) and they're working on it, some people are reporting that IMAP access is still OK, and there's a tiny smattering of "It's back!" shrieks in the twitterstream. Various smug so-and-sos are saying "See! Cloud is naff!" (as if self-hosted email is utterly reliable), and the #gfail hashtag has become the number one trend.
Google has just posted this to its Gmail support page:
2/24/2009
We're aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a number of users. This problem occurred at approximately 1.30AM Pacific Time. We're working hard to resolve this problem and will post updates as we have them. We apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused.
The BBC is reporting that 113 million people use Gmail, but neither it nor Google is saying how many are affected by the problem.
PreviousComments on this post
IMAP okay for me but not webmail
Same here - it's only the webmail that's down, IMAP is fine and I'm still getting email forwarded through the Gmail backend.
Also getting mixed reports from mobile users, many of whom still get access, many of whom don't.
What Twitter needs is proper geo reporting...
Its just come online for me. But the javascript was running really slow and in the end I had to force quit the page from firefox.
No doubt the millions of users refreshing every 30 seconds like me make starting the system up again near impossible.
Anyway, I caught a glance of my inbox before quiting. Long enough to see that I had no new mail (after all that). Typical. I expect most of the lost productivity time world wide will be false lost productivity like mine.
It's back here too - and according to the explosion of happiness on twitter, it seemed to come back around the world pretty much at the same time.
I'd love to know how that architecture works...
