The dust has cleared. The Gmailageddon now subsiding I emerged from the bunker to do battle with potential zombie hordes…and search for any survivors.
The madness of the great Gmail meltdown of ’09 (again) had the tubes of the internet all a flutter this morning. Seriously though, why is it such a big deal? Are folks so dependent on Gmail that when it crashes life stops?
If so, wtf?
But, amid the mayhem and carnage of the morning there was an interesting piece that popped up on TechCrunch. Apparently, some ne’er do wells managed to create a group that used background noise to spread porn Google groups in the midst of the carnage of the blue screened clouds.
Google’s response to the outage?
If you’ve tried to access your Gmail account today, you are probably aware by now that we’re having some problems. Shortly after 10 9:30am GMT our monitoring systems alerted us that Gmail consumer and businesses accounts worldwide could not get access to their email.
We’re working very hard to solve the problem and we’re really sorry for the inconvenience. Those users in the US and UK who have enabled Gmail offline through Gmail Labs should be able to access their inbox, although they won’t be able to send or receive emails.
We’re posting updates to the Gmail Help Centre at http://mail.google.com/support/ and Google Apps users can visit the Google Apps help centre at www.google.com/support/a.
Thanks for bearing with us while we sort this out. We’ll report back as we make progress.
Posted by Acacio Cruz, Gmail Site Reliability Manager
So, with all the talk of cloud computing, what happened with Gmail (and other services) yet again?
Another typo?
Is it raining?
Well, I suppose they are broke offline mode……
NO! The end of the world! The dead shall rise! Stock market crashes! Ronald McDonald becomes the ruler of the world!
Yeah. I know some businesses who use Gmail for business – particularly when they have email on their phones. So I can see how this can cause some issues, but not a huge deal. We survived for hundreds of years in the business world – thriving – without email. I’m sure we can do it for a day.