Yesterday was a day of outages for MobileMe and Gmail. Apple’s MobileMe, which had a rocky introduction to begin with, saw a four and a half hour mail outage yesterday. MacRumors mentioned this outage yesterday but also took a look at MobileMe’s overall uptime which is about 96%. That’s not an impressive number when you put it into perspective. Over the last two weeks since Apple deemed MobileMe reliable, the service was down for 13.5 hours, or 6.75 hours per week. When you think of it that way, that’s too much downtime for a service that is responsible for doing so much. People usually expect uptime of about 99% or greater.
Gmail too had an outage yesterday. We don’t know the exact length of it, other than Google said it was a couple of hours in the afternoon. It’s not like Google to write a blog post about an outage, but in this situation they did. They said, “we feel your pain, and we’re sorry.” They went on to explain what happened, apparently there was an outage in their contacts system that prevented Gmail to load properly. On the blog post, they said, “We heard loud and clear today how much people care about their Gmail accounts. We followed all the emails to our support team and user group, we fielded phone calls from Google Apps customers and friends, and we saw the many Twitter posts.” They went on to say, “We never take for granted the commitment we’ve made to running an email service that you can count on.”
Maybe Google needs to start a blog just for outages? They’ve got so many different services that experience outages on occasion, and people like to know what’s going on. On their blog post about the outage yesterday they even said that they usually don’t write about problems like this on their blog, which they don’t. In this case they said they made an exception because so many people were impacted. It shouldn’t matter how many people were impacted because if you are someone that is experiencing an outage, you would like to know what’s going on. A blog just for those outages might be a good idea…
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Tags: Google, Web Sites, Apple, Gmail, Gmail Outage, Google
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Internet outages is the main reason “cloud computing” is not advancing fast enough. Having all your information in the cloud, and not being able to retrieve it, is a pain in the neck.
That’s the great advantage of Microsoft Office which saves your information directly on your hard disk. That way you can access it whenever you like, unless…..your HD goes bad.
Hmmm, detailing outages… I wouldn’t count on it, Google and Apple are not exactly well-known by their transparency, which it’s a shame, as that means they’re an easy target for rumors, and customers never really know what’s going on when there’s a problem.
I wonder if GMail’s problems was the cause of the inability to log in yesterday to their Jabber servers…
They said it was a problem with their contacts system that caused Gmail not to load properly…
“So why not switch to Google Apps? We maintain our hosted software 24/7 so you can sleep at night.”
I find it incredibly funny that on a post talking about how Gmail was down the ad above appears.
How ironic!